Picture: David Gray/AFP
Who is Fanie Fondse, 62, when he is not supporting Tokyo Sexwale in looking for the missing trillions, or fifteen zeros as he called it at the event? Has he also been duped or is he also just interested in finding missing trillions, such as the Gaddafi millions?
Fanie Fondse. Photo: LinkedIn
He is also the man who laid criminal charges against President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Sandton police station last week about his alleged involvement in corruption.
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The charges of racketeering, money laundering and treason are connected to Shanduka, a company in which Ramaphosa was a shareholder. It is alleged that Ramaphosa “persuaded” the Free State department of education to give Shanduka a contract to build schools in the province without advertising the tender or following a bidding process.
At Sexwale’s press conference, Fondse said he had been investigating the “looting” of the fund, that he “has seen the fund’s account” and that it “does exist”. He has 200 shares in the Reserve Bank, along with many other people such as Professor Jannie Rossouw from the Wits Business School. Rossouw worked for the bank for many years and says shareholders do not have the kind of information Fondse claims he has.
Fondse also participated in a film, The Hunt for Gaddafi’s Billions, recently broadcast by BBC 1. He is named in the press pack for the film as being friends with someone called Johan Erasmus, an “arms dealer and intelligence specialist”.
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According to the press pack, Erasmus is a “man with a very shady history” who infiltrated black freedom fighters during apartheid” and a “close adviser” of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s former dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
“His dark past means he’s got a wealth of contacts and with the help of his friend Fanie Fondse (Afrikaner and ex-Special Forces), he can get to the mercenaries who were part of Gaddafi’s last convoy and the very people who flew the money out of Libya,” the text reads.
On a website called Onafhanklik (independent) that purports to be aimed at “freedom in truth”, a post on 18 February 2020 shows all 219 pages of an “affidavit submitted to the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture deposed to by (Fanie) Adriaan Rudolph Fondse, regarding the theft of 178,000 metric tons of GOLD from the Reserve Bank” (sic).
In an interview after Sexwale’s press conference, Fondse made various allegations about “100,000 tonnes of gold” that was stolen and that former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was killed by an international banker syndicate. This syndicate, he said, established a “fake financial system” or “fiat currency”.
Fondse said a syndicate in the Reserve Bank was stealing all the gold and that the fund was started from 1966 to 1968. He says 100,000 tons of gold was sent to the Reserve Bank on 1 January 1966 as the first deposit.
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To put his claims in context, 100,000 tons of gold in today’s money is worth US$57 trillion (R813 trillion). This is just more than the combined GDPs of the world’s top five economies, being USA, China, Japan, Germany and India.
Best estimates are that the total amount of gold mined in South Africa to date is about 41,000 tons. The World Gold Council says the best available estimates suggest about 197,576 tons of gold have been mined in the world throughout history, of which around two-thirds has been mined since 1950.
So where did the “missing trillions” come from?
According to its annual report, Fondse tried many times to put items on the agenda of a special meeting of the Reserve Bank that could not be accepted.
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