He was a generous individual who valued friendship, hard work and loyalty.
This is how Augustinus Petrus Maria Kouwenhoven, better known as Guus Kouwenhoven, was described at a memorial mass in the upmarket Cape Town suburb of Constantia held last Wednesday, 16 September, to celebrate his life.
The 83-year-old had died just over a week earlier, on 10 September.
During Kouwenhoven’s send-off (Daily Maverick has watched a video of it), a relative who eulogised him created the impression that he was a workaholic who always put others above himself.
But court records tell a very different story.
Kouwenhoven was a convicted war criminal accused of providing camps for Liberian militia who “decapitated civilians” and “threw living babies into wells”.
For his part,
as News24 reported, he countered that he was the target of a Dutch witch-hunt.
Kouwenhoven seemed super wealthy – he could afford lawyers to steer his lengthy international legal battles, and he was spotted driving luxury cars around Cape Town.
In the years leading up to his death, he was based in opulent suburbs in the city while fighting extradition to the Netherlands, where he had been sentenced to 19 years of imprisonment.
Take, for example, a
1977 news article from a US Napa Valley newspaper. It said a Dutch “art salesman”, Augustinus Petrus Maria Kouwenhoven, had pleaded guilty to trying to dispose of or sell seven stolen paintings “by 17th and 18th century masters”, including a
Rembrandt, and was facing two years in jail or deportation.
Roughly 40 years later, the Southern Africa Litigation Centre cited that precedent in a legal affidavit, questioning why South African authorities allowed Kouwenhoven to
remain in the country.
The scandals he was involved in stretched from artworks to trees... and civil war.
Court records and updated addresses show Kouwenhoven later relocated to the affluent coastal suburb of Bantry Bay, while media reports also placed him in upmarket Constantia, where his memorial service was held last week.
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