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New apartheid cases planned  Comments
January 11, 2010


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.


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.





Showing page 1 of 4 comment pages, 34 total comments
33 Weeks ago Amaboston USA wrote :
Well, well, well, here is another reason South Africa will follow the way the rest of Africa is going and has gone. "Cry the Beloved Country" should be the title of a re-write of a book about a dying country. One afternoon in 1995, Radio 702 was linked to a radio show in the US., who's host made it clear that he was a Black person and proud of it. He made then made the following predicition; "I hope I will be wrong, but your country will go the way of the rest of Africa as Native Africans have the uncanny ability of harming themselves and their countries more, than the colonial settlers they displace." My hope and dream is that he may just possibly be proven wrong. Come on South Africans, stop the crime, kill the past and build the future.
33 Weeks ago Anonymous wrote :
If this goes to Court what Does the Esteemed president hope to Achieve ? You say Elvis that Apartheid Killed Many over the years and etcetc.. What a Load of Crap , What of the last 16 years ?? How many People have been raped murdered robbed hi-jacked ??? What about the WAR that is South Africa at the moment? that in London we Have as many young BLACK AFRICANS as we do WHITE AFRICANS here with no faith in the Government , no faith in the politics and no faith in thier fellow men.. Grow Up , smell the GunPowder and hear the Children Scream , in SA under you have to deal with loadshedding and rubbish and poor healthcare , at least here while running away from CRIME which hit me 3 times , I have the opportunities to achieve. as a WHITE AFRICAN , I was born there ,my blood is in the soil , it is what I long for at the end of the Day , the sound of AFRIKA , but not with those kind of attitiudes..
33 Weeks ago Had enough bull wrote :
If the SA government supports these actions, then they should also return every cent of aid money which has come into SA since 1994. How often do I see signs in public places indicating that some project has been funded with EU donor money, Etc. So if these court cases go ahead, the governments should take all their donor money refunds and then award the balance to these money grabbing individuals. Unfortunately these actions do more harm than good to the people who actually depend on the goodwill of foreign governments.
33 Weeks ago Ontheball wrote :
Who is going to sue the ANC, SACP and SWAPO for reparations for atrocities and human right abuses carried out in the Quatro prison camp in Angola????
33 Weeks ago Anonymous wrote :
The case against Armscor . The reality , did South Africa received the 50 helicopters , yes Did Armscor used the services of Pinhol , yes How about the French , did Aerospatiale received payment for the helicopteres ? Yes Was the business legal ? yes , Ilegal matters can not go to court . If that is the case and the helicopteres are still being used by the Government , why the objection to pay the people that took risks to help the RSA ?, instead of sending funds overseas to assist elections of certain european parties ?
33 Weeks ago ExcaliburVIII wrote :
The only winners will be the lawyers.
33 Weeks ago ExcaliburVIII wrote :
According to this report, the complaint good, bad or indifferent was instigated by "one aggrieved middle man who lost out on his share of a lucrative arms deal in the 1980s". Whilst the criminals should be exposed, I recall: "Ants get crushed when elephants fight". It's long since been evident to the perceptive that corruption in the arms trade is worldwide.
33 Weeks ago Anonymous wrote :
This is what they resort to, they blead whites dry in SA, like in Zims, they R not happy they have all in Sa, but now want to steel from other communities. While the ANC name places after terrorists, they want to persue companies that led to south africa being a power house of africa, from power to lanky shower we will be, you think having no electricity is bad, wait until you have no water, no food (farmers being murdered) no services, no police, no education & then you expect people to invest in SA, your world cup will not bring investments, but this time the truth is out, the world will see SA in true lite, that it is another failing african state, thank you "ANC"
33 Weeks ago Elvis wrote :
haha ! lots of hypocracy in this blog. so when should justice be persueded ? When it is Mugabe ? lots of guys are jumping up and down about corruption, crime and rape but dont want to hear about their own ilk rot. Apartheid exterminated millions people slowly over the years and similar to the Nazis Africans lived in great fear in the own country, just as the jews during the war in Germany.
33 Weeks ago Observing wrote :
Armscor and African Defence Systems (ADS), the disgraceful and fundamentally corrupt organisations and both a shame for South Africa in the past, now and it looks like in the foreseeable future as well.
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