Premium: Full transcript – Interview with Valence Watson

Hello I'm Alec Hogg and this is The Rational Perspective. In this episode Valence Watson on his brother Gavin, Agrizzi and Bosasa. Before our meetings this week, I last saw Valence Watson more than a decade ago, acting as peacemaker in a meeting between my former colleague the late Barry Sergeant and a group of BEE investors in the now delisted gold company Simmer & Jack in which Valence and his brothers had an interest.

After their meeting, this great investigative journalist spent time getting to know Valence and his brothers and the now apparently infamous Watson clan from the Eastern Cape. It's instructive that Barry's initial hostility and deep skepticism turned full circle first, in the story that I was mediating over and later on a broader scale, in a book that he wrote about whistleblower Kevin Wakefield who exposed how Deutsche Bank had trashed the South African rand, Barry wrote very warmly about the Watsons. I knew the uniquely talented Sergeant literally from the day he entered journalism in the mid 1980s. We worked closely together for years and I remained in awe of this trained advocate's ability to dispense with the fiction and question pursued facts. His work ethic was second to none. There's no doubt in my mind that were Barry alive today, he'd be providing some balance to the popular narrative that casts the Watsons as rogues who bribe the ANC politicians to secure inflated state contracts through their company Bosasa. And it would be he, not me who'd be now providing this side of a story that really makes little sense. Through live transmissions of the Zondo Commission to State Capture on South African television, a nation became enthralled with the testimony of a self-confessed criminal Angelo Agrizzi. But as I discovered over the past couple of days, listening and checking documentation with Valence Watson, all is not what it seems. In the end – either the super rich Ferrari obsessed Agrizzi has conned the commission, the media and South Africa at large or Valence and the other three Watson brothers, committed Christians and ANC operatives during the country's darkest hours, have not only lost their moral compasses but also their minds. But let's start at the beginning.

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