Allegations have surfaced of what could be the largest fraud scheme in South Africa involving First Strut, the holding company of the First Tech Group. According to a Mail & Guardian investigation, deceased First Strut chairman Jeff Wiggill and Andy Bertulis, chief executive officer of First Tech Group may have been involved in building a company for the sole purpose of fraud.

First Strut was one of the country’s largest privately owned companies. After the murder of Jeff Wiggill, the company and its subsidiaries have been provisionally liquidated due to unpaid debts. And that’s when the house of cards came down.

According to Mail & Guardian’s sources:

Some of us knew that there was weird stuff going on but we all thought there was just a little bit of fiddling [of the books] here and there.

In June we started to compare notes and talk to one another, and we got our minds just blown. It was … the scale of it, it was just impossible.

A First Strut insider said:

In this company [First Strut] there was not a single transaction that was entirely legitimate. Every deal had a little something extra, or a twist. All of it was dodgy, all of it.

The allegations made by the Mail & Guardian’s sources  have been denied by Bertulis, who claims to have no knowledge of this wrongdoing.

A source with information of First Strut’s operations said:

There would be a machine that would be financed five times over by five different banks. There were even cases where they went back to the same bank six months later and the bank financed the same machine they had already financed.

A former executive of First Strut said that those who knew of the fraud were “looked after” in order to maintain loyalty, and also stated that neither Wiggill nor Bertulis were “guys who broke knees or dropped hints”, but when they were confronted regarding the irregularities in the books, the pair were angered.

At Wiggill’s memorial service, people paid their respects, but “there was not a wet eye in the house”.

It is also believed that both men took large amounts of money from the company. Bertulis allegedly hid these assets in places where liquidators could not find them. Wiggill allegedly wired money to his family and attempted “to secure life policy payouts to the value of R30 million for his life partner”.

A source revealed:

Jeff was the crooked accountant, the guy with the smarts. He would have seen [the implosion] coming before Andy. He bugged out.

These stories have been detailed and confirmed by more than one source, and all suspected that the books had been doctored for many years, before they had started their employment.

If these charges against these two men are proven in court, this will then be South Africa’s largest fraud scheme in history.

[Source: Mail & Guardian]