http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5308449
New multibillion-dollar legal cases that are being prepared in Europe against big businesses and sanction busters during the apartheid era are what persuaded President Jacob Zuma to allow the class action for apartheid reparations to proceed in New York.
The fresh and damning new evidence, which was brought to Zuma's attention last year, "changed the whole system and the whole point of view", Willem Heath, Zuma's legal adviser, has confirmed.
For years the government of Thabo Mbeki had opposed the US apartheid lawsuit brought by Dumisa Ntsebeza and the Khulumani Support Group for fear of what it would do to foreign investment.
However, so damning was the fresh evidence presented to Zuma by Justice Minister Jeff Radebe last year that he was forced to make a radical shift on government policy.
The latest cases are being prepared in Portugal and Belgium, with spin-offs in several other countries, against a number of financial institutions and corporations, some of which are still operating in South Africa.
They are not being brought by apartheid-era victims, but instead were instigated by one aggrieved middle man who lost out on his share of a lucrative arms deal in the 1980s.
Armscor contacted arms merchant Jorge Pinhol in 1986 to help facilitate the sale of helicopter parts to South Africa at the height of the arms embargo.
However, the parts were to be ordered from French company Aerospatiale, but not wanting to implicate French President Jacques Chirac, they rerouted the order via Portugal, which was a member of Nato.
Being Portuguese and a well-known arms trader, Pinhol was the ideal middle man and he was offered a 10 percent cut if he could pull it off.
Though the deal went through, Pinhol never got his multimillion-dollar cut and in his attempt to seek compensation all these years later, he has set in motion a chain of events that "will make apartheid look 10 times worse then we ever imagined", as one source puts it. "This is a game changer."
Switzerland
The cases now go beyond Pinhol and Armscor and are expected to hit hard at financial institutions, insurance houses, arms-related corporations and a string of other sectors, and will name and shame a host of prominent people, South Africans among them, who lined their pockets during that era.
Click here!
The cases come at a time when Switzerland finds itself under scrutiny for its tradition of banking secrecy.
A vast amount of the money generated from apartheid-era dirty business was stored in Swiss bank accounts.
One such account was opened to a South African last year for inspection, though they have declined to divulge any detail of what they found.
Not only that, however, the Swiss government also lent billions of dollars at punitive rates to the dying South African government at the very end of apartheid, when sources from all other countries had run dry.
Last year the notorious oil broker and sanctions buster Marc Rich broke his silence on his years of wheeling and dealing with the apartheid regime.
He claimed to have made more than $2 billion during the 15 years he traded in South Africa between 1979 and 1994, claiming it was where he carried out his "most important and most profitable" business.
However, he is only one of thousands of people who did well from the apartheid regime, as these new cases will show.
Whether they will reach the courts before 2010 is out, is still unclear.
Meanwhile, the lawyers for the South African Apartheid Litigation, the umbrella for the Ntsebeza and Khulumani plaintiffs, will appear in New York's Second Circuit Court of Appeal tomorrow to argue why their case against General Motors, Ford, IBM, Daimler AG and Rheinemetall AG should go ahead.
Should it proceed, thousands of South Africans stand to gain in what could be a multibillion-dollar payout. Should it fail, the litigation group will have one more chance to present its case at the US Supreme Court of Appeal.
New multibillion-dollar legal cases that are being prepared in Europe against big businesses and sanction busters during the apartheid era are what persuaded President Jacob Zuma to allow the class action for apartheid reparations to proceed in New York.
The fresh and damning new evidence, which was brought to Zuma's attention last year, "changed the whole system and the whole point of view", Willem Heath, Zuma's legal adviser, has confirmed.
For years the government of Thabo Mbeki had opposed the US apartheid lawsuit brought by Dumisa Ntsebeza and the Khulumani Support Group for fear of what it would do to foreign investment.
However, so damning was the fresh evidence presented to Zuma by Justice Minister Jeff Radebe last year that he was forced to make a radical shift on government policy.
The latest cases are being prepared in Portugal and Belgium, with spin-offs in several other countries, against a number of financial institutions and corporations, some of which are still operating in South Africa.
They are not being brought by apartheid-era victims, but instead were instigated by one aggrieved middle man who lost out on his share of a lucrative arms deal in the 1980s.
Armscor contacted arms merchant Jorge Pinhol in 1986 to help facilitate the sale of helicopter parts to South Africa at the height of the arms embargo.
However, the parts were to be ordered from French company Aerospatiale, but not wanting to implicate French President Jacques Chirac, they rerouted the order via Portugal, which was a member of Nato.
Being Portuguese and a well-known arms trader, Pinhol was the ideal middle man and he was offered a 10 percent cut if he could pull it off.
Though the deal went through, Pinhol never got his multimillion-dollar cut and in his attempt to seek compensation all these years later, he has set in motion a chain of events that "will make apartheid look 10 times worse then we ever imagined", as one source puts it. "This is a game changer."
Switzerland
The cases now go beyond Pinhol and Armscor and are expected to hit hard at financial institutions, insurance houses, arms-related corporations and a string of other sectors, and will name and shame a host of prominent people, South Africans among them, who lined their pockets during that era.
Click here!
The cases come at a time when Switzerland finds itself under scrutiny for its tradition of banking secrecy.
A vast amount of the money generated from apartheid-era dirty business was stored in Swiss bank accounts.
One such account was opened to a South African last year for inspection, though they have declined to divulge any detail of what they found.
Not only that, however, the Swiss government also lent billions of dollars at punitive rates to the dying South African government at the very end of apartheid, when sources from all other countries had run dry.
Last year the notorious oil broker and sanctions buster Marc Rich broke his silence on his years of wheeling and dealing with the apartheid regime.
He claimed to have made more than $2 billion during the 15 years he traded in South Africa between 1979 and 1994, claiming it was where he carried out his "most important and most profitable" business.
However, he is only one of thousands of people who did well from the apartheid regime, as these new cases will show.
Whether they will reach the courts before 2010 is out, is still unclear.
Meanwhile, the lawyers for the South African Apartheid Litigation, the umbrella for the Ntsebeza and Khulumani plaintiffs, will appear in New York's Second Circuit Court of Appeal tomorrow to argue why their case against General Motors, Ford, IBM, Daimler AG and Rheinemetall AG should go ahead.
Should it proceed, thousands of South Africans stand to gain in what could be a multibillion-dollar payout. Should it fail, the litigation group will have one more chance to present its case at the US Supreme Court of Appeal.
