Wicknell Chivayo handed out Rolls-Royces, posed with piles of cash and bought a R160 million home in Clifton. Then, days after Open Secrets asked the Hawks to investigate how R800 million from a Zimbabwean election contract landed in his South African accounts, his helicopter came down outside Harare. Michael Marchant, head of investigations at Open Secrets, traced how a man with a fraud conviction and a decade of damaging headlines moved money through South African banks, estate agents and luxury car dealers, and why the presidents who praised him at his funeral may have their own reasons to keep the myth alive. He argued this was never only Zimbabwe's problem: with his estate now up for grabs and a fresh FATF review looming, the Chivayo case had become a test of whether South Africa can stop being a parking lot for the continent's dirty money..Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview.Alec Hogg (00:01) Wicknell Chivayo called himself Sir Wicknell. He was quite a big deal on social media. If you’d followed any of his posts, you’d know that he handed out Rolls-Royces to musicians and others, posed with piles of cash, and he owned a R160 million house in Clifton. On the 30th of September, his helicopter came down east of Harare, killing him, his wife and three others. Presidents of that country and elsewhere called him a visionary. Many Zimbabweans, though, celebrated his passing. Days before he died, Open Secrets asked the Hawks to investigate how R800 million from a Zimbabwean election contract had ended up in his South African bank accounts.Now that Wicknell has gone, does the case die with him? And what does it say about a country that only recently left the grey list of the FATF? Michael Marchant wrote an excellent column for the Financial Mail this week, and he’s with us now as, I guess, the resident expert in South Africa on Sir Wicknell. He is the head of investigations for Open Secrets.Michael, welcome. But tell us a bit about Open Secrets before we go into this extraordinary story.Michael Marchant (01:36) Hi, Alec. Thanks very much for having me on the show. So, Open Secrets: we’re a non-profit organisation based in Cape Town. Essentially, we do the work of investigative journalists, but we combine that investigative journalism with legal and advocacy work to pursue accountability. Our focus is very much on corruption and economic crime. But in particular, what Open Secrets really tries to focus on is the private sector enablers of that type of grand corruption. I think South African listeners will immediately be aware of the fact that grand corruption, whether it’s in South Africa or elsewhere, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens with a set of enablers in the financial system and the professional services system, and that’s where we tend to focus our work.What it means, of course, and we’ll speak about that a little bit today when it comes to Wicknell Chivayo, is that our focus tends to be on both sides of the corruption coin. We’re looking at people directly involved in state corruption, but we’re also trying to focus on the ecosystem of actors, especially in the private sector, around them that facilitate those deals.Alec Hogg (02:49) Sounds like dangerous work.Michael Marchant (02:52) Look, to the extent that all investigative journalism in South Africa and elsewhere carries risk, it certainly does have its risks. What we would generally say, and this is borne out in South Africa in general, is that whistleblowers and sources of information are the first line, and are often at greater risk than the journalists who tell those stories. But yes, it comes with risk. Essentially, it’s an important first line of defence, and so the work does need to continue.Alec Hogg (03:23) My long-time colleague, the late Barry Sergeant, said that his greatest defence was actually getting it out into the open, getting a story he was working on published. And he had some amazing stories in a similar line over many, many years. Do you find that as well, that by going public, all of these shadowy characters are maybe going to be a little more reluctant to do something nasty?Michael Marchant (03:50) I think it’s absolutely true. We speak about it a lot at Open Secrets: especially the period between when the subject of the investigation becomes aware of the investigation and the publication date. That’s really the point at which the risk is greatest. As an investigator and as an investigative journalist, you have the duty to contact people for comment. So there’s that inevitable part of the work where you are going to the subject to say, “We’re looking at this and we want to know your answers to these questions.” And certainly there’s a period of risk there.Alec, it’s also worth reflecting on the fact that it’s not just physical, personal risk. And this again is not just true in South Africa, but for organisations like ourselves, it’s a legal risk. Very often, particularly wealthy people, and we’re obviously looking at large corporations, have essentially limitless resources compared to us. The eternal risk is that there’ll be an attempt to abuse the courts, and there have often been attempts to obtain gag orders to stop publication. We’ve certainly borne the brunt of that. We are lucky to operate in South Africa, where we have a relatively free press, and the courts have, in the main, been excellent in guarding freedom of speech and the right to publish, especially when that publication is in the public interest. With all of these stories, when you’re looking at serious allegations of corruption and economic crime, our argument is that it’s always in the public interest to publish those allegations.Alec Hogg (05:33) Did you ever meet Mr Chivayo?Michael Marchant (05:38) Never in person. Both we and investigators we’ve worked with on these stories have had correspondence with him and his lawyers, again in terms of receiving comment, but no, I never had the opportunity to meet him. As you said in the introduction, what was so interesting about Chivayo as a character is that he was so public in everything he did. So many characters who operate in the world of tenderpreneurship and corruption are in the shadows. Chivayo was the example of the opposite: one of those people who absolutely flaunted his wealth and was very open, in many ways, about the way he was trading that wealth for influence. As you’ve said, if he was purchasing a car in South Africa for a member of parliament in Zimbabwe, he would boast about that online. It was very much part of his persona to show that he was able to do so.Alec Hogg (06:43) There was a lot of outrage, though, at those posts, when you go back and look at the comments underneath them. So you have to wonder what he was trying to achieve. Do you have any theories?Michael Marchant (06:57) That anger you talk about, you’re absolutely right, was palpable, especially in Zimbabwe. And as I wrote in the piece, it’s easy to lose sight, in the story about Chivayo, of what it ultimately means when someone like that is extracting the kind of funds from the fiscus that he was, with the assistance of actors in South Africa, which we very much need to speak about. He’s doing that at the direct expense of people in Zimbabwe. People both in Zimbabwe and South Africa will know how the economy has stagnated and how poverty has got much worse. So you’ve got millions of people there struggling to access basic goods, and someone posting online about gifting another Rolls-Royce to another politician. It was inevitably going to draw a lot of anger.In terms of why he was doing it, I think it’s quite difficult to work out. It’s always difficult to speculate about someone’s mental state and motivations when you don’t know them personally. But from what we could see, there were a couple of elements to it. One was that he liked to lean into a rags-to-riches story, this idea that someone could come from nowhere, and to demonstrate what he was able to gain, regardless of the fact that it was illicit. And then there’s also an argument, and this is always very difficult to determine, that part of his shtick was to talk up the amount of influence and access he had. There’s a case that in some instances he would overpromise on what he was able to deliver and the kind of networks he had. He certainly had very senior political connections in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, but it was part of his game to make sure everyone who saw him thought he had that access, in order to keep the deals flowing.Alec Hogg (09:08) And the point of presidents calling him a visionary: when you look at the cast of characters at his funeral, it included his ex-wife, which was quite interesting, who lives in the Caribbean or somewhere. But those who were there, the president of Zimbabwe and others, really tried to talk him up, extremely high and extremely loud. You’d wonder why you would do that with a guy who, surely they have to realise, is going to get exposed after his death.Michael Marchant (09:49) Agreed, and I think it’s very strange that that has happened. For the characters who travelled to the funeral, and various people who have been praising him in the week since, I would presume, and again it’s a bit of speculation, that people will also be worried that his death has the possibility of bringing more information into the open. So there could be an element of defensiveness here: you almost want to double down on this myth that he was a legitimate businessman. As Zimbabwean journalists and others have been pointing out, it’s inaccurate to call him a businessman, because there’s no evidence that the companies he was running were ever doing anything aside from acting as middlemen in corrupt tenders.But I certainly think that the presidents of Tanzania and Kenya, and certainly the faction of ZANU-PF behind President Mnangagwa, want to double down on the idea that he was just a legitimate businessman, and therefore there was nothing unusual about dealings with him.It’s also worth mentioning, Alec, because this goes to who he was and his influence in Zimbabwe, that he had become deeply enmeshed in Zimbabwean politics, particularly the contestation in ZANU-PF around succession. Those who have been following the story may know that, put very simply, a couple of camps have developed: one around the current president, Mnangagwa, and the other around the vice president, Constantino Chiwenga. Chivayo was very close to Mnangagwa and that faction, and had increasingly been involved in very high-stakes and very public battles with Chiwenga and the opposing faction. That had drawn him into very serious allegations of corruption, because the faction opposed to him was increasingly using this evidence to try to drive a wedge there. So Mnangagwa and others have a vested interest in continuing the notion that there was nothing untoward, and perhaps that’s why they’re continuing with this narrative despite some of the information and evidence that’s coming out.Alec Hogg (12:17) Hm. He also isn’t the first person to have had a helicopter fall out of the sky. We remember what happened in Russia with Prigozhin. Is there any sense that there could be foul play here?Michael Marchant (12:32) I’m not sure; I couldn’t say either way. There’s always a possibility, but at the moment I haven’t seen any credible evidence from anywhere suggesting there is. And this is not just true of this accident; we know this in South Africa better than some others: when someone like this dies in an accident, it leads to so much speculation. Rumours start everywhere. Is he dead, is he alive? Was it an accident? Was it foul play? From my side, I haven’t seen anything credible, and I wouldn’t speculate about it at this point.Alec Hogg (13:21) For someone who’s never heard of him, and I guess a lot of the Biznews tribe would fall into that category: who was Sir Wicknell? And how did this guy from rags end up with a R160 million house in Clifton? Because if you want to buy a house with that amount of money, it has to come through some systems. When we get small amounts of money coming to us at Biznews from our overseas business relationships, it all has to go through the Reserve Bank, and I’m talking a couple of thousand. Here’s R160 million. How does that work?Michael Marchant (14:01) Alec, this is the central question Open Secrets has been trying to grapple with: not just how Wicknell acquired his wealth and the contracts, but the secondary question of how he was able to have such an extensive presence in South Africa. He ran businesses, he owned property, he purchased vehicles. And as you said, all of that is, or should be, subject to the controls of the Reserve Bank and the Financial Intelligence Centre.But let me go back a little, because your question speaks to two things. The first is: who is he, and where does he come from? Maybe the best place to start is that in, and I may be getting the date wrong, around 2011, he is actually imprisoned on a fraud charge in Zimbabwe. He’d been involved in some kind of low-level fraud case, nothing too significant. That’s where the story could have ended. But within four or five years, his first big break in Zimbabwe comes, and it comes through the assistance of a South African company he’d been involved with, called Intratrek. Essentially, that company gets the contract as a middleman for an energy project in Zimbabwe, a solar farm.Without going into the forensic details, what many people in South Africa will immediately recognise is the story of a front company that doesn’t do anything and doesn’t have a track record in any work relevant to the project, in this case solar energy. What they do is act as the go-between between the international client that wants the contract and the state. That contract is inflated. Ultimately nothing gets built, or if it does, it’s inadequate and behind schedule. But of course the middle company is able to extract a huge amount of money and then pay kickbacks into the political system. That starts in about 2014, 2015. From there it escalates, and certainly from the outside, he seems to leverage one contract to move to the next.And as you mentioned earlier, once that money is coming in, in US dollars in Zimbabwe, he starts purchasing cars for ZANU-PF members of parliament. He starts donating vehicles to the party around election time. He’s able to trade that into greater influence and more contracts, and it snowballs from there.The contract that Open Secrets first came to, through our partners at an organisation called The Sentry, and which brings us directly to South Africa, was a contract with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission for a range of election equipment the commission had requested: voter ID systems, ballot systems. They had requested this from a South African printing firm based in Johannesburg called Renform. The information that came out through various sources and documents leaked to us and The Sentry showed that he’d inflated the contract massively. To go back to the numbers you gave at the beginning: the Zimbabwean Ministry of Finance paid R1 billion to Renform, the South African company, and out of that, R800 million, so basically 80% of the contract, went to Chivayo’s South African companies.Michael Marchant (17:52) From those companies in South Africa, money was then paid into some of Chivayo’s personal accounts. He used them at Daytona and a couple of other high-profile luxury vehicle dealerships in Johannesburg. And that brings us to Open Secrets’ interest; that’s the basis of the criminal complaint we gave to the Hawks.Alec Hogg (18:14) Before we go there, Michael, this is exactly what the Guptas were doing, first at Transnet and then off they went to Eskom. They did exactly the same thing: taking a contract that was required, massively inflating it, scooping off, in this case, 80%. He wasn’t shy, this fellow. And then paying off those who allocated the contract in the first place. So it seems to be a bit of a template.Michael Marchant (18:45) Absolutely a template. You’re right, Alec, the modus operandi is incredibly similar. And it’s similar across the world in how procurement corruption works: you inflate the value of the contract in order to extract kickbacks. In this particular instance, 80% of the contract is so egregious. When Renform were contacted for comment by us and The Sentry, they gave a glib response: yes, Chivayo was our agent in Zimbabwe, but there’s nothing unusual about paying agents in relation to contracts. We pressed them: in what world would a legitimate company pay 80% of the value of a contract to a middleman? They weren’t willing to answer those questions.And you raised the Guptas and the fact that that was the modus operandi in South Africa. Just like the Guptas, it leads us to the inevitable next question, which you raised: for everyone doing these transactions in the South African ecosystem, what checks were they doing? What were the checks and balances? When you move money across borders, that has to be cleared by the Reserve Bank. The Financial Intelligence Centre requires banks, estate agents and luxury car dealers to report suspicious transactions to it. It also requires them to do very detailed know-your-customer checks on these individuals. Our argument is that if you do a know-your-customer check on Chivayo at any point, especially after 2021, when this is happening, you’ve got basically a decade of public reporting, not just about a prior criminal conviction but about very serious allegations of his involvement in corruption.The purchase of the Clifton home is a perfect example. There are real questions there around the estate agent, the extent of the checks they would have done and the reporting they would have made to the authorities. What I will say, and this came out in our investigation, is that it’s very difficult as an investigator to know exactly who was reporting in terms of the legal requirements and who wasn’t.There is in this case, which is quite rare, a leaked Financial Intelligence Centre report from South Africa. It was provided to Zimbabwean authorities and then leaked in Zimbabwe, which is how it became public. We know from that FIC report that some South African banks were making suspicious transaction reports, which is the bare minimum a bank needs to do: if it sees something strange happening, it reports it into the system. But at this point we can’t confirm whether the estate agents and car dealers did the same.Alec, this is a long answer, but what it then brings us to is that once those private sector actors either do or don’t report, the fundamental challenge facing South Africa is whether law enforcement agencies proactively address those cases. That is really where a lot of the system is currently falling down. It’s one of the reasons we went to the Hawks in this case, to say: we want to assist. We know a fair amount about the Renform transaction and the South African actors involved. Let us tell you everything we know about how the transaction happened and where we think the criminal liability may lie. At the very least, it’s encouraging that the case has been formally opened and that they’ve said they’re going to continue. The next test will be whether they can effectively investigate and hold, at the very least, the South African actors to account where wrongdoing is found.Alec Hogg (22:44) Hm. That is encouraging, and it’s encouraging that it hasn’t been squashed, as many of these cases often are. But there are also reports, allegations, perhaps just gossip, that he knew Cyril Ramaphosa, our own president, quite well. Has Ramaphosa’s name popped up in any of your investigations?Michael Marchant (23:09) Not in relation to any wrongdoing. But like many South Africans, we were very concerned when Wicknell Chivayo was part of the Zimbabwean delegation that met Ramaphosa on a trip to Zimbabwe this year. And the Presidency’s response to that was really disappointing. Essentially, their position was that the Presidency, Ramaphosa and the people around him weren’t aware of the allegations against Chivayo. But by that point there had been at least a year of reporting in South Africa and elsewhere, not just about the allegations in Zimbabwe, but that he was active in South Africa and using the financial system here. So at the very least, we, like others, were concerned that he was part of that delegation, and we think the Presidency’s response was very disappointing. But to be clear, in terms of our actual investigation into any transactions or deals, we haven’t seen any connection directly to the president.Alec Hogg (24:13) Sure. You know, sometimes I wonder whether those in Pretoria think we’re idiots, the public, because the evidence is so clear. Here’s a guy spending like a member of the Elon Musk family in South Africa, going crazy, and not with South African income but with Zimbabwean income, and we’re expected to just accept, “Well, sorry, we slipped somewhere”, when so many of us have had engagements with the exchange control authorities over fractions of this amount of money, and it becomes quite a compliance issue. Be that as it may: here in South Africa, you guys have been pressing quite hard, but that’s only one contract. Are there others that have come to your notice?Michael Marchant (25:16) In terms of South Africa, no. The investigation we’ve run has been exclusively focused on the Renform contract and all the transactions that flow from it, which are obviously quite extensive. Since his death, the challenge for us is to sort the rumour from the fact. In particular, to go back to what we were speaking about earlier, Chivayo had become incredibly close to presidents around the continent. He was travelling regularly to Kenya and was seen in the presence of President Ruto. He was very close to the president of Tanzania, to Zimbabwe, and obviously he’d amassed assets here. So one of the open questions now is the extent to which other information might come into the public domain. Now that he has passed, there’s always the chance that people will be able to speak about those things. But at the moment, for us, it’s been the Renform contract.Maybe the other thing to mention, in terms of where we go from here and why this is a particularly important moment, is that his estate is going to be the subject of a huge amount of contestation. In fact, just a couple of days after the helicopter crash, he was due in court in Zimbabwe again over divorce proceedings and questions around his estate. There had been assets seized in South Africa pending that court order on his divorce. One of the reasons we’ve really pressed the South African authorities now is to say: if there are assets that are the proceeds of crime, whether in South Africa or elsewhere, they need to be seized pending an investigation before they’re dissipated, because this is potentially the moment when other people get their hands on them. So that brings a new urgency to dealing with it.Alec Hogg (27:25) How big a story is this in Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Kenya?Michael Marchant (27:32) Enormous. In Zimbabwe, what was remarkable, and we spoke about it a little earlier, is that the public reaction in many cases was one of celebration. Lots of Zimbabweans came out very publicly on his death and said: this is no loss, actually, because this is someone who has been fleecing us and is really indicative of what the problem is. So the news in Zimbabwe is absolutely huge. In Tanzania and Kenya as well, very big news, with a massive public reaction and a lot of public debate pressing the presidents and political elites in those countries to explain their involvement, to examine the contracts Chivayo was involved in, and pushing for accountability.And it’s maybe worth reflecting on the fact that the public reaction in those countries has definitely been bigger than the reaction in South Africa. It’s difficult to explain that. On the one hand, there’s what you could call scandal fatigue. With the Madlanga Commission going full tilt, for many South Africans this is one more story about whether law enforcement will pursue a case. But what we would certainly argue at Open Secrets is that in South Africa we’re sometimes not good enough at really looking at cases where South African institutions are complicit in financial crimes that hurt people elsewhere. It may be that some South Africans look at Chivayo as a Zimbabwean problem. But when someone facing those allegations is able to purchase a R160 million home in Clifton and vehicles, was running at least six or seven companies, and was moving the alleged proceeds of crime through our banking system almost at will, that’s a South African story we need to grapple with. It’s not a story we can pretend belongs somewhere else.Alec Hogg (29:52) More broadly, is South Africa becoming a haven for these criminals from other parts of the continent? That takes what you’ve just said to the next level.Michael Marchant (30:06) We would argue that the risk is definitely there. About eighteen months ago, Open Secrets published a report on South Africa’s real estate problem, and the fact that the real estate sector, in Johannesburg and Cape Town in particular, has become a haven for dirty money. Political elites and political families in the DRC, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea and elsewhere have been able to park their money in South Africa over many years.And that brings us to the question of the grey list and the FATF. One of the reasons we were placed on that list a few years ago was precisely because the FATF looked at our anti-money laundering systems and found them deeply deficient: it was too easy for people to park dirty money here. We came off that list, but we are now subject to another review. What Treasury officials are already expressing concern about is that we have pretty good anti-money laundering laws on paper, but are people ever being prosecuted for foreign bribery or money laundering? Our argument is that the Renform case is the perfect test case. There’s a huge amount of evidence here, financial intelligence and more. If our law enforcement agencies aren’t able to take these types of cases to conclusion, which they have not been particularly successful at, there’s a risk that we return to the grey list at some point, with all the costs associated with that.So again, this is not a Zimbabwean problem; it is a South African problem. As a haven for dirty money, you’re not only complicit in harm happening elsewhere, you’re also risking the integrity of your entire financial system, and all the costs that come with that.Alec Hogg (32:07) Yes, the knock-on effects, as we well know in South Africa. Michael Marchant is head of investigations at Open Secrets, and he has told us the incredible story of one Wicknell Chivayo. Go on to X; you can look him up. An extraordinary guy. Lived life, lived large, and gave, and bragged about giving, luxury vehicles to very influential people who had their hands on the tillers of power, but more importantly on contracts. Interesting story. It’s not the last time we’ll be talking about this one. I’m Alec Hogg with your BizNews edge..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.