Marika Sboros: The ‘ghost’ in the machine - high-profile ‘betrayal’ stakes at the Mauerberger Foundation Fund

Key topics:High Court bid to suspend MFF directors over governance breaches“Ghost email” and alleged fraud expose internal board conflictsFunding deviations and fiduciary failures threaten MFF legacy.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Marika Sboros.In the quiet, wood-panelled world of South African philanthropy, the Mauerberger Foundation Fund (MFF) has long stood as a bastion of generational legacy and social justice.That is set to change with an explosive, urgent filing in the Western Cape High Court on April 13, 2026, against three of MFF’s five directors, including MFF Board Chair and Managing Director Dianna Yach, granddaughter of the Fund’s industrialist-philanthropist founder Morris Mauerberger.The applicants are two of MFF’s directors: Yach’s cousin, Steven Levy, a businessman and the Board’s longest-serving director, and her brother, Dr Derek Yach, a US-based medical doctor, public health specialist and World Health Organisation (WHO) veteran..Crucially, among the final relief sought is for the court to declare Yach, Higgins and Figaji “delinquent directors". .The interim relief the applicants seek, pending the final determination of the court proceedings, is Dianna Yach’s immediate suspension from the MFF Board, along with fellow directors Igshaan Higgins and Prof Brian Figaji. Higgins is an attorney and a director of De Klerk en Van Gend Incorporated. He is also founder-curator-director of the Cape Heritage Museum (also called the Cape Muslim and Slave Heritage Museum) that receives generous MFF funding.Figaji is an engineer and Chancellor of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), has served on the UNESCO Executive Board and chaired the South African National Commission for UNESCO. He is Chair of the fishing company, I&J, a trustee of the WWF Nedbank Green Trust and Chair of the Abe Bailey Trust. As CPUT Chancellor, Figaji serves an institution that receives MFF funding for the "Brian Figaji Scholarship for Women in Engineering".Crucially, among the final relief sought is for the court to declare Yach, Higgins and Figaji “delinquent directors". Under South African law, the declaration can be a professional death sentence. A delinquent director is disqualified from holding a directorship in any company, from being the trustee of a Trust or bearing office in a non-profit organisation (NPO) for at least seven years. In some cases, the declaration is for life. That legal "nuclear option" is reserved for those found guilty of gross abuse of position, wilful misconduct or a total breach of fiduciary trust. It brands them as a permanent threat to the public interest..At its core, Levy and Derek Yach’s extensive court filing of over 1100 pages is a battle for the legacy and soul of the institution that Mauerberger created in the late 1930s..A leading precedent is the Pretoria High Court case of Dudu Myeni, former Chair of the South African Airways Board. She was declared a delinquent director for life in 2020 after a relentless legal challenge by OUTA (Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse), a civil-action NPO dedicated to challenging the abuse of authority and misappropriation of public funds.The order led to Myeni’s personal financial ruin. OUTA successfully pursued punitive legal costs against her personally, moving for sequestration when she failed to pay. Kumesh Moodley, attorney for the applicants, says that an application to have directors declared delinquent under section 162 of the Companies Act is “a step of the most serious consequence”. His clients have not taken lightly or prematurely.“They have taken it now because their evidence before the Court, and the gravity of what is at stake for the MFF and its beneficiaries, dictate that it is not a step open to them to avoid,” Moodley says. “It is a step they are obliged to take in discharging their fiduciary duties as directors."For Figaji, these court proceedings are not the first relating to how he carries out his fiduciary duties. In the 2020 High Court case involving Marib Holdings (the Chapman’s Peak tollgate operator), valid legal grounds were proven for shareholders to sue Figaji and two fellow directors for a potential breach of fiduciary duties. The court record established that the directors bypassed the Companies Act by paying themselves just over R2-million in fees in the 2017 financial year, without the required shareholder approval, leading the judge to rule that their actions must face legal scrutiny. Their attempt to use the Court to block a shareholder’s quest for accountability was unsuccessful. At its core, Levy and Derek Yach’s extensive court filing of over 1100 pages is a battle for the legacy and soul of the institution that Mauerberger created in the late 1930s.The MFF has funded community-based and academic institutions in South Africa, Israel and the West Bank in education, health and alleviation of poverty for more than 80 years.The applicants claim that Yach has effectively seized control of and laid “siege” to the MFF, turning it into a personal “fiefdom”. They say it is one where compliance, procedure and corporate governance have been rendered relics of the past. No fewer than nine formal complaints have been made against Yach, Higgins and Figaji for breaches of the Companies Act and conduct inconsistent with the overriding duty to act in the MFF’s best interests. Levy and Derek Yach allege a deliberate, systematic “governance collapse” and “methodology of financial misrepresentation” behind more than 11 years of constitutional non-compliance with the MFF MOI (Memorandum of Incorporation).The MOI records Mauerberger’s express wishes. It imposes a mandatory distribution regime requiring 50% of annual, distributable income to be allocated to Israeli entities, 25% to South African Jewish entities and 25% to South African non-Jewish entities. Despite this prerequisite, from 2014 the Israeli allocations were skewed, declining as low as 4% in 2017; 6% in 2021; 7% in 2022 and 5% in 2023. In 2024, Israeli beneficiaries made up 10% of total donations, which were just under R15- million. The applicants argue that the MFF lost its primary "moderating influence" in a matter of days when two experienced directors walked away in early 2025.The papers reveal that Yach’s brother, Jonathan Yach, resigned as a director with immediate effect on December 25, 2024, after 23 years of service. He stated that "recent events" had fundamentally challenged his perspective on how to best serve the MFF.On January 3, 2025, independent director Adv Joe van Dorsten, a renowned author and tax law and Companies Act expert, resigned in direct response to Yach’s "personal criticism" and declaration that she had "lost trust" in him after he raised reasoned governance concerns about boardroom transparency.The applicants allege that the resignations were not just administrative exits. They were the first documented casualties of a clear pattern where independent directors who dare to challenge the Chair are not heard but are instead driven out.With these two directors out, Higgins, who sits on the UCT Law Clinic Advisory Board with Yach, was appointed to the Board. In this way, court papers say Yach formed a majority "voting bloc" with Higgins and Figaji that marginalised dissenting voices and insulated her conduct from any form of meaningful oversight. The MFF’s departure far from the MOI’s legacy path and non-compliance deepened, the applicants claim. They note that Figaji conceded in August 2025 that funding allocations were non-compliant with the MOI. He proposed returning the MFF to compliant status by 2028. Yach and Higgins promptly supported and accepted the proposal. The applicants refer to this roadmap of “deliberate deviation” as a “programme of continued non-compliance, dressed in the language of gradualism.” In contrast, Levy had proposed “a path to immediate restoration of the Founder’s wishes”.They claim further that Yach has routinely ignored MOI’s mandates through "creative accounting" designed to provide a false appearance of constitutional compliance.One example is the “intentional” miscategorisation of a controversial R1-million MFF donation in September 2025 to Gift of the Givers charity as an allocation to an Israeli beneficiary. Perhaps the single most explosive evidence in the filings is what the applicants call the "Ghost Email" fabrication. It marked the transition from a messy boardroom brawl to an alleged scandal of documented instances of fabrication, fraud and fundamental dishonesty. It was set off, according to court papers, by a relatively large R600,000 MFF grant allocated in the 2025/2026 budget to Higgins’s Cape Heritage Museum. The applicants see this funding as a suspicious 500% increase in just five years, starting from R100,000 in 2021. Similarly, they see Higgins voting on his own 2025/2026 grants for his museum without disclosing his personal interest as breaching the Companies Act.When Levy tried to act as a proper fiduciary by requesting a "Verification Register" to assess whether the grant was properly considered and to assess compliance and risk indicators, he says Yach responded dismissively. She apparently contended that non-executive directors are not entitled to that information and went so far as to invite Levy to resign and Higgins backed her up.The message to directors appeared clear, say the applicants: stop asking questions or resign; either way, you are not getting the information you seek. Court papers present a digital forensics analysis showing that Higgins drafted a Board letter to block Levy’s attempted oversight of his own museum and sent it to Yach only, allowing her to pass it off on March 6, 2026, as her independent decision.This effectively exposed the “Ghost Email” ruse, the applicants say, when she dispatched the complex document after a physically “improbable” 16-minute window. Perhaps most damning was Yach’s apparently simple oversight: in the rush, she failed to delete remnants of Higgins’s professional law-firm signature before firing the email off to the full Board. It became a digital “smoking gun”.By adopting the grantee's objection as her executive decision, the applicants say Yach transformed “from the guardian of the grantor's interests into the protector of the grantee's interests".They see this as a pattern of "betrayal of office of the most extreme and gravest form". They raised a separate event on March 31, 2026, supported by metadata establishing that Figaji used his personal computer to draft a resolution to appoint himself as MFF Vice-Chairperson. Yach then circulated it as her own proposal and later dismisses this misrepresentation as “procedural minutiae”.Metadata show that this document was created just 55 seconds apart from a retaliatory disciplinary resolution against Levy. The applicants say this aimed to obstruct Levy’s attempts to access grantee funding information.They say that Figaji officially recorded his vote in favour of his own appointment on April 1, 2026, without disclosing his authorship to the Board. On April 8, Yach announced Figaji’s “election” as Vice Chair of the MFF Board..The applicants contend that this appointment is invalid and carries no authority as the resolution behind it was “clandestinely” engineered by the very person who stood to benefit from it. They see this as a “self-serving” breach of fiduciary duty designed to ensure that a “sympathetic successor” remained in power should the High Court suspend Yach as Chair. Levy and Derek Yach say these events involve different directors and dates but are linked by a single “modus operandi of concealment”. They say Figaji’s actions reinforced the bloc’s “retaliatory and self-serving character”, mimicking the “covert collaboration" that the “Ghost Email” exposed. Evidence of multiple attempts by both applicants to gain access to information on funding decisions over the years supports their contention of an incriminating “wall of silence”, which the respondents constructed.They argue that "where three directors of a charitable foundation collectively refuse to engage with questions about the application of that foundation’s funds, the inference is that engagement would expose what silence is designed to conceal".Court papers note Yach’s unilateral suspension of the MFF’s decades-long commitment to funding Telfed, South African Zionist Federation (Israel) in March 2021. Telfed has long served as “a bridge between the Southern African Jewish diaspora and Israel, supporting immigrants (olim) and fostering the educational, cultural, and communal ties that bind (Jewish) communities across continents”, CEO Dorron Kline writes in a letter to MFF directors in March 2026.When Kline engaged Yach at a donor gathering in Cape Town in March 2025 and raised the possibility of resuming Telfed’s relationship with the MFF, he recalls her conveying the following sentiment: “Israel’s reaction to the Hamas 7th October (2023) atrocity is outrageously disproportionate. Israel is clearly committing genocide. Therefore, Israel has lost its right to call itself a nation amongst other nations. There is no reason for Telfed to approach the Mauerberger Foundation for funding until the Israeli government ceases to kill innocents and agrees to the establishment of a Palestinian State.” The applicants see this as Yach’s pattern of holding the MFF hostage to her personal political beliefs with impunity. Initial court filings create an overwhelming impression of the respondents transforming the MFF Board into a virtuoso performance of "musical hats". It is brimming with conflicts of interest, allowing them to rotate seamlessly at will into donors, recipients and "independent" auditors of their own self-advancement. Yach’s dual role as both MFF Chair and MD makes her the Foundation's only paid employee. This allows her to control oversight of her own executive conduct, the applicants note. This structural conflict is mirrored in her senior governance roles at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where she sits on its Council as one of two representatives elected by donors, and chairs the HR and other committees. Court papers show that UCT has become a primary beneficiary of "over-allocations" while Israeli funding has been systematically slashed. In 2023, for example, UCT received R3.8-million from the MFF, while the mandatory Israeli allocation was a mere R600,000. Critically, Yach voted in favour of academic boycotts against Israeli institutions at UCT as part of the “Gaza resolutions”. She then deposed to a sworn affidavit in the ongoing Mendelsohn lawsuit against the university, explicitly using her title as "Chair of the Mauerberger Foundation Fund" to support this political stance without Board authorisation or notification, the applicants allege.In this intricate web of entanglements, the applicants say that Yach has advocated for boycotting the very beneficiaries MFF is constitutionally mandated to fund, while her colleagues moonlight as clandestine ghostwriters of their own grants and vice-chair appointments. As the matter heads to the High Court on May 4, 2026, the question remains: Can a foundation survive when its "proper channels" are "actively barricaded by the very individuals who would later insist, with indignation, that those channels should have been used"?The applicants are family but their filing is clearly not the fruits of a family squabble. They see it as their duty as fiduciaries to ensure that their grandfather’s legacy is preserved and that its beneficiaries’ work in South Africa and Israel continues to thrive with MFF support.If the court finds that Dianna Yach, Higgins and Figaji have used "ghost" channels to govern and wilfully breach their fiduciary duties, the MFF may finally be forced to course-correct. .*Dianna Yach, Brian Figaji and Igshaan Higgins were emailed for comment.Yach replied by return email: “I will not respond to any of the averments that you make at this time. I will request my lawyers to respond to you in due course, and only once the matter that you have referred to has been called in open court on 4 May 2026.”.Figaji and Higgins did not reply. All have since filed a notice of intention to oppose the application. They have until April 30, 2026 to submit answering affidavits.

Marika Sboros: The ‘ghost’ in the machine - high-profile ‘betrayal’ stakes at the Mauerberger Foundation Fund

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