Louis Liebenberg appears in the Bronkhorstspruit Magistrates Court on 15 November. Picture: Gallo Images
After a dramatic appearance in court on Thursday during his wife’s bail application, diamond dealer Louis Liebenberg is expected to apply for bail in the Bronkhorstspruit Regional Court on Monday.
A source close to the case told The Citizen on Monday that Liebenberg has decided to represent himself.
Liebenberg, Dezzi, and seven others stand trial on 42 charges of fraud, theft, racketeering, and money laundering.
They were arrested by the Hawks on 22 October at the Tonino restaurant at the Benoni Country Club. By the next day, nine suspects had been arrested.
The group is accused of running a scam involving unpolished diamonds and fraud.
14:15 He says Tariomix was a shelf company which was started in 2011 but was only put to use on 9 March 2020. “We then started working specifically on Forever Diamonds and Gold (FDG).
According to Liebenberg, the first hiccup they encountered was in September when the “Afrikaner mafia” in Stellenbosch told Capitec that he’s doing the same as with Wealth for You and that he “can become big” if they left him. “Capitec the froze the account with R72 million in October. We won that case against Capitec and the money was released.”
He says his testimony is a discussion. “I take responsibility for the things I had control over, and also the dream of putting the mineral wealth in the hands of ordinary people.”
14:00 Liebenberg says he decided to stand as an independent candidate in the elections in May this year.
“Msholozi asked me to develop a political company. The reason is that Umkhonto we sizwe (MK) was uncertain if the ANC would recognise them as a political party.”
He testifies that he funded the political campaign for MK. Not in its entirety. [Vladimir] Putin also “came to the rescue”.
13:45 Liebenberg says he is not good with money, but he is good with ideas.
“I must leave the administration in the hands of people I trust.”
He then started Wealth for You Mining and Exploration, in which people bought shares. “However, the same thing happened that is happening now. It became a media frenzy.”
13:30 After his wife left him, he went to live on the street although he “owned three houses”.
“I stayed in Carnival City for nine months and under a tree in Benoni for another nine months. My father died the same year.”
On the birthday of his first child, he lied under a tree and cried “bitterly” about what he had done with his life.
Liebenberg starts to sing, but the words of the song are unclear.
“I then hiked to Port Nolloth after God spoke to me and started working as a deck hand.”
13:20 In 1985 he started Melkweg Romerige Genot as opposition to Milky Lane, which he sold in 1986 at a substantial profit.
He then worked at the Springs municipality as a housing legal clerk. “On the day I resigned, I developed a certain need to use the secretary’s desk as a toilet”.
13:00 He says his tertiary education is a bit checkered.
He started studying B.Juris at Potchefstroom University in 1983.
In 1985 he got married and had his first child. He was then forced to give up his studies and find work. He graduated in 1991. He later studied towards a Master’s Degree in Business Leadership (MBL), but did not complete that.
According to Liebenberg he tried to buy a master’s degree in Londen which he paid £2 000 for, but says it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
12:45 Liebenberg says he is the second of five brothers. His brother Yochanan is Jewish and resides in Brittain. His older brother lives in Melville and is a gay pastor. The fourth brother is a member of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), while the fifth brother works on ships.
“Our family is really the United Nations. My father died on the night of his 60th birthday, my age at the moment.
Liebenberg says he was born in a hospital in Hillbrow.
He went to Grey College from gr. 1 to gr. 3 when his father became a pastor for the “happy clappies”. The family then moved to Lindhurst.
12:30 He now talks about De Beers mining 15 million carats of diamonds in South Africa. “What they do is, like in Namakwaland, to pick all the profitable areas. They destroy the communities. When they leave a specific area, 95% of the people are unemployed and end up back where they started.
Liebenberg says that is a message that especially white South Africans does not want to hear. “We do not want to hear that we’ve destroyed the souls of African people.”
He goes on to say that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) offers opportunities to a few select individuals and the rest of the people cannot enter an industry and become a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or a shareholder in a company like Anglo America or De Beers.
“The question remains: What happens to the people in Namakwaland, in Kimberley and the Northern Cape? The people I fight for. The Afrikaners, with our privileged background, do not share our knowledge and wealth with the rest of the country.”
12:15 Liebenberg says he is well experienced in the diamond industry. “However, I do not deal in diamonds. I do not hold the licenses, but I employ people who are licenses do deal.”
He now talks about his experience working in the diamond industry in Africa.
12:00 He now talks about his travels in Africa and says Africa should be one. “There shouldn’t be borders and separation.
He says he travelled in the back of a police van with a Zimbabwean man on Monday morning. “Foreigners do not feel welcome in South Africa, but do not have the means to get back to their own countries.”
While traveling through Africa, Liebenberg says he saw a lot of hardship and cried for days. “I realised then that my calling was for the people of Africa.”
11:45 According to Liebenberg, he has travelled extensively since the age of 16. At that stage he was a member of the Transvaal Youth Choir and travelled overseas with the choir. At the same age he travelled overseas to discover the world.
“At that age I haven’t seen a naked woman because my father was a pastor.”
11:35 Liebenberg states his date of birth. “That makes me 60 years old. And that makes me a person who has gone through a lot in this country, and I realised that I have to make a difference in this country. I’m a South African citizen; I’ve been that since birth.”
He says he has a valid South African passport which he uses as his identity document (ID). “My ID document was taken by the liquidators as they took my clothing, my underpants, my wife’s perfume and her clothing.
He now talks about how the contracts on their rental properties were cancelled.
11:25 Liebenberg says at first Tariomix was about buying and selling. He hired 129 people from groups of unemployed zama-zamas. “We wanted to find a solution to a problem – the access to mineral wealth that ordinary people need desperately. The Europeans took the mineral wealth from ordinary people.”
He says the Afrikaner cannot continue in the old ways of apartheid. “Yes, I am a product of apartheid. I have been caught using the k-word, but I’ve also been called the k-word.”
11:15 Liebenberg says that the State would argue that he hurt a lot of people in the process.
“In fact, that was the first words that Colonel Danie Bruwer told me when he arrested me. My first reaction was that I have helped thousands of people that you don’t talk about.
“In fact, when the liquidators started attacking my company Tariomix in a very evil way, they’ve never answered the question about why they started recruiting Joint Venture (JV) partners at least two months before the date of liquidation. Eight months later the Master of the Supreme Court refuses to call those liquidators to book.
“What we’ve seen since was balaklavas, guns, pointed at staff members and, since my incarceration, the destruction at the mines in Namakwaland and Koingnaas.
11:00: Liebenberg testifies that his wife left him in 2000. They were divorced in 2002.
He says he is a direct descendent of Kratoa. “She is the first Khoi-San woman we really know about and who was the translator for Jan van Riebeeck in 1662.
“I can feel the link with the Khoi-San daily. It’s interesting, because when you look at me, you would say I am German-Jew. But the fact of the matter is, that a lot of Afrikaans people, a lot of the Boere (and there’s a big difference between the two), come from that background. All of us have some Khoi and San in us.
That made such an emotional appeal on me as a nine-year-old as I was standing at the harbour in Port Nolloth and I saw the diamond boats going to sea. But I saw something else at the time. I saw alcoholism, I saw unemployment in Namakwaland. I’ve seen a father grappling with the fact that South Africa is polarised as it is right now. And I don’t think we’ve done very well as a nation in the past 30 years to try and sort that out.
I have committed myself to the journey of bringing reconciliation between people. Not tokenism as the Government of National Unity (GNU) is doing. What I’m doing is on a personal level, on a local level, on an economic level to try and uplift people.”
NOW READ: Magistrate in Liebenberg case steps down, Louis disrupts court
Download our app and read this and other great stories on the move. Available for Android and iOS.
