Ultimately, she self-recorded at least two conversations with ‘the Pom’, both of which incriminated ‘the Pom’ and BAT plc in possible bribery, corruption and money-laundering and in efforts to conceal these crimes from the state.24
It also became apparent from these conversations that ‘the Pom’ was indeed in close contact with Burger and Niemann of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team. She played these to me one evening at my home and I recorded them myself. She retained the originals.
BAT ultimately caved in and sent a detailed list of deposits made to her, every month for about a year, including cash payments she had collected in the United Kingdom from them, and also set out an amount still due to her. She privately gave me a copy of this.
By this time, I had reached the end of my tether. What else was she hiding from me? We began to have arguments and I started to distance myself from her, slowly but surely. But she kept on reassuring me that all was above board and approved by the state. I didn’t agree with her, and told her so, but she maintained the facade and said she was the lawyer – not me.
During the course of the relationship, we discussed the tobacco industry at great length at times. But these were private discussions, and I certainly never intended them to become public. She claimed to know all sorts of crazy things about Carnilinx’s directors, that they were supposedly involved ‘in drugs’ and in laundering money, that one had physically abused his wife, and so on. I never referred to these things in any conversations or submissions I made subsequently. But at this stage, as far as she was concerned, Carnilinx was one of the bad guys.
According to Walter, the Illicit Tobacco Task Team’s officials were also all corrupt to the core, abused her and some had made untoward advances to her. All were ‘in the pocket’ of TISA, BATSA and BAT plc: there was an unholy alliance between this task team’s key officials and BATSA, BAT plc and TISA. At one point, when I asked how it was possible that she as an attorney could associate herself with such behaviour, she said she didn’t know better and that she only really came to understand the true nature of things following discussions with me. To ‘redeem’ herself, she took it upon herself to expose what she knew. She asked me to introduce her to a journalist who, she said, should be someone I trusted completely and able to understand the tobacco industry with all its complexities.
The only person whose name jumped to mind at this stage was the financial journalist and editor of Business Times, Rob Rose. I met with Rose informally and said to him that Walter wished to meet with him and had all sorts of things to tell him. I explicitly stated they weren’t tax-related issues and that I could not be part of the discussions.25 I had little inkling of the true extent of the incestuous nature of the relations between officials of the task team, BATSA, BAT plc and TISA, and what I did know was limited to what Walter had chosen to share with me.
Walter met with Rose. I wasn’t present and to this day have limited knowledge of what was exchanged between them. In preparation for this, she downloaded lots of emails, text exchanges and other information from her older mobile handsets and data cloud from past years. In a few texts to me, she refers to these. She used these in her engagements with Rose to support her allegations. The media article ultimately authored by Malcolm Rees, one of Rose’s reporters at Business Times, the business section of the Sunday Times, was based on some of Walter’s evidence. It was published by Sunday Times on 30 March 2014 with the tile ‘BAT’s Smoke and Mirrors War on Rivals’. Walter completely sold the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA, BAT plc and TISA down the river. Whereas they had once been comrades in arms – and Carnilinx and the FITA members the criminals – suddenly SARS was the only good guy in the game. This was soon to change.
Our relationship had by this time become very strained and I began to see less and less of her. Things reached boiling point on the evening of 31 January 2014, when at a social gathering she disappeared, asking for my car keys, ostensibly to get a jacket from my car because she was cold, but she stayed away for an unusual amount of time. I asked a female friend of mine to check up on her, as I thought she might be in the bathroom. My friend came back and told me she had found Walter in my car, busy going through my mobile phone. This was the third such incident. Walter, clearly embarrassed by being found out in this way, returned and began to accuse me of infidelity. She stormed off in a huff back home.
The next day she told me what had happened on that fateful evening after she got home. She made contact with a director of Carnilinx, Kyle Phillips, asking him to ‘take her back’ and ‘provide for her financially’. In exchange she offered to assist them in their ongoing battles with the state. Phillips did not hesitate and arranged for an advocate, an attorney and the journalist Malcolm Rees to meet with him and Walter the very next day. At this meeting, Walter explained to them all that she was a spy for both BAT plc and the Illicit Tobacco Task Team. Apparently, she also made some nasty allegations about me. So by this time, it was now the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA, BAT plc, TISA and SARS who were the bad guys, and Carnilinx were suddenly the good guys again.26
Later in the afternoon of that same day, 1 February 2013, I drove past Walter’s home to see if she was okay. She had calmed down by then and let me in. We had a discussion and she then began to tell me that she had made a terrible mistake and elaborated upon what she had done, also showing me her texts to Phillips of the night before. She immediately began to withdraw what she had confessed to Carnilinx, the advocate, the lawyer and Rees, in various letters, emails and text exchanges to them.27 She even wrote to me a day or two later, apologising for defaming me, stating she had made up the allegations against me on the basis of ‘industry rumour’.28 In hindsight, I should have by this time run a mile. But I didn’t. I ascribed her behaviour to someone who had lived a double life and who hadn’t been properly debriefed by her handlers, and so I was instead quite sympathetic to her. This was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. We made peace.
Following these events, she addressed letters to Rose, Rees and various others at Sunday Times, in effect asking them to return the evidence she had given to them. They refused. Then it was the turn of the Sunday Times and some of their journalists to come under fire, with Walter accusing Rees of having accepted bribes, being offered a holiday and cocaine, to report in a biased manner, and another journalist of having supposedly received sportswear as a bribe from a tobacco manufacturer.29 Rees has denied these allegations and I believe that he was cleared by an internal investigation around this time.
She had flipped again, now reverting to the position that it was Carnilinx, the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA, BAT plc and TISA (as well as some Sunday Times journalists) who were the bad guys. SARS were the good guys again. This was to change again soon enough.
Having temporarily burnt her bridges with the Sunday Times and Business Times, she asked me again to introduce her to another journalist who could be trusted and would understand the complex world of cigarettes. This time I introduced her to the Mail & Guardian journalist Sam Sole under pretty much the same conditions as when she had met Rose a month or so earlier.30 Once again, she handed Sole all sorts of evidence in support of her stories. But now she was adamant that she needed the data on her handsets and in the cloud fully recovered and she asked me to help. I did. I accessed and downloaded whatever was in the data cloud and also asked a friend who had such a business to make mirror-images of the data on three of her handsets which she had given me. My friend did this professionally, and gave me two copies on memory sticks, both sealed in plastic evidence bags.31 I returned the handsets to Walter, as well as both memory sticks.32 She handed one back to me, saying I should keep it, and that I could use it for whatever reasons I chose. I think that at the time she didn’t think I would look at the data at all, because I just threw it in a basket among other junk that I kept on top of my fridge. I genuinely believed at the time that whatever may have been on that memory stick was limited to what she had shared with me and I saw no reason to look through it. It would only later become significant for me.
By this time, she had flipped back to the position that the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA, BAT plc, TISA, Carnilinx and the FITA members were the bad guys, for different reasons, and that SARS was the good guy again. The article by Sole was published in the Mail & Guardian on 20 March 2014, entitled ‘Big Tobacco in Bed with Law Enforcement’.
I had last seen Walter at the end of April 2014, and