Auction Alliance are a big deal in the auctioning off of South African properties, and founder Rael Levitt has made a pretty penny off the back of flogging properties for the likes of Absa.

That caught the attention of Business Day, who sought to publish a report stemming from a forensic probe carried out by Allan Greyling and his team at Accountants at Law (A@L) in 2012.

That report has been hidden from the pubic until now, although Levitt tried to prevent the publishing of the report with an urgent interdict. That attempt failed, and now we can see those details:

…the auction house had an arrangement with Absa to market certain bulk residential properties that were in default, on behalf of Absa…

However, according to Locketz and as stated in the report, Auction Alliance bought some of these properties for itself without disclosing this to Absa.

This was allegedly done through an entity called Red Sky Capital that is linked to Auction Alliance…

Levitt is currently listed as the MD of Red Sky Capital on his LinkedIn page…

In a separate section of the report, details are provided about staff at the various banks who had allegedly received “cash” payments from Auction Alliance, and often on the instructions of Levitt, all for the apparent purpose of procuring business for his firm.

Based on e-mail trails, general ledgers, as well as oral evidence from Auction Alliance staff, the payments were a regular feature of the business practice.

It ain’t just Absa who were receiving cash payments:

The report also reproduced an e-mail that was sent to Levitt in 2011 that appears to show how Nedbank staff were receiving cash payments from Auction Alliance. However, the staff in question have since left the bank and Nedbank told Business Day on Tuesday that it pulled all business from Auction Alliance when the scandal broke in 2012 as part of its commitment to zero tolerance of corruption.

Imagine our politicians shared that ‘zero tolerance of corruption’ policy?

[source:bdlive]

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