Brett Kebble

In September 2005, corporate South Africa was rocked by the violent murder of mining maverick Brett Kebble. In life, he was known as a billionaire patron of the arts, compassionate philanthropist, champion of black economic empowerment, urbane raconteur and generous host. But within six months of his death, Kebble was exposed as the architect of one of the biggest and most convoluted frauds seen by any stock exchange in the world, a flawed genius who lied and cheated and stole so cunningly that even astute auditors were fooled. By the time he died, Kebble was both broke and jobless. His legacy was a maze of convoluted transactions that would take forensic investigators months, perhaps years, to untangle. The trail would lead from one of the African continent’s oldest and most venerable mining houses to more than 100 shell companies; from the diamond fields of Angola to the new black elite in democratic South Africa’s upmarket suburbs. But in the wake of Kebble’s death, far darker secrets than his unorthodox and downright criminal transactions would also come to light. Many of them are revealed for the first time in this hard-hitting A-B-C of Brett Kebble’s brilliant but terminally crooked business career.