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Former Sars commissioner Tom Moyane joined the service with a clear brief to frustrate its investigative efforts into illicit trade, organised crime and tax evasion, many of which implicated politicians and prominent individuals. This was told to the state capture commission by former Sars executive Johan van Loggerenberg on Thursday.

His modus operandi, said Van Loggerenberg, was to muzzle investigators who sought to defend themselves against a media campaign that coincided with Moyane’s arrival in late 2014, aimed at discrediting their investigative work.

No sooner had Moyane arrived in September, than the first of a series of articles implicating senior Sars staff members in corruption and abuse of state resources appeared in the Sunday Times. In an article in December 2014 that implicated him directly, Van Loggerenberg was at pains to defend himself against a tight newspaper deadline, even asking for permission from Moyane to do so, but not  receiving such. He replied to the query, and his comments were included in the article.

“I was told you’re not allowed to defend yourself, you’re not allowed to defend the institution. You do so, we fire you overnight,” Van Loggerenberg said, describing the backlash he received for responding to the query.

The allegations in the article appeared to have been sourced from a leaked copy of the Sikhakhane report, which had investigated the so called “rogue unit and he had been asked to respond in his individual capacity and not send a Sars response. The threat against his job came from then executive in charge of employment relations Luther Lebelo in an e-mail copying Moyane. He was also instructed to retract his denial to the allegations, which he did, albeit unwillingly.

Two months earlier, in October, the six members of the unit – which Van Loggerenberg refuses to refer to as “rogue”, but rather a high risk investigative unit – had sought protection from Moyane, after the first of the series of articles by the Sunday Times was published. It claimed that members of the unit had bugged the private home of former president Jacob Zuma in Forest Town, Johannesburg, around the time that he was elected ANC president in 2007.

The group denied the allegations in a letter to Moyane, asking that for the sake of transparency Sars subject them to an investigation into the allegations. They never received a response from the commissioner.

By the time Van Loggerenberg resigned from Sars in February 2015, he had noticed that numerous investigations under Sars’s Honeybadger project had been halted for no apparent reason. He told the commission that around 2014/15 there were over 87 such open cases. Honeybadger was tasked with investigating cases of a similar nature that involved high profile individuals.

“[Evidence leader] Mr [Alistair] Franklin highlights a common denominator in these cases, which is that they all came to a halt in 2014/2015. There are three other common denominators … virtually every single one of them has connections to politicians and politics,” said Van Loggerenberg.

“All of them relate to sophisticated and complicated criminal schemes, where racketeering would be the offence. All of them have state intelligence operatives’ footprints all over them.”

The background painted by Van Loggerenberg was that prior to Moyane’s arrival, Sars had been successful in infiltrating the organised crime sector, hence it unearthed the high profile players. However, because those being investigated had been caught off guard, common trends started to emerge like attempts to bribe officials of Sars, invoking delay tactics to avoid accountability, and more and more frequently, name-dropping of powerful people with whom the alleged criminals were associated. In the mid-2000s the resistance intensified, he added, leading to cases on record of officials being held hostage, shot at or in some cases, killed.

“By the mid-2000s I began to experience two things with the people that I was working with internally. One was that some people felt incredibly uncomfortable doing this kind of work, saying we’re auditors, we don’t want to carry guns.” 

However, because there were successes in mitigating these crimes, and notable collaboration with law enforcement agencies, the tactics changed to personal attacks on officials and accusations of corruption. “People created dossiers of these things, which at face value makes for a good read if you don’t know anything. But the minute you get into it then you find that it’s complete nonsense.”

Sars was aware at this time of the complicity of intelligence officials from the State Security Agency (SSA) in the smear campaign, said, and issued a media statement in July 2014 to assure the public that it was working with the Hawks to address the matter.

Prior to Van Loggerenberg’s testimony, the SSA asked the commission for permission to redact some of the names in his affidavit that are alleged to have been involved. The commission publishes witness affidavits on its website as soon as they complete their evidence. 

Issued by Corruption Watch