Shivambu brother suffers VBS court blow, ordered to repay millions – report

EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu’s younger brother Brian has suffered a legal blow in relation to debts owed to the liquidated VBS Mutual Bank, according to a report.

Daily Maverick revealed on Thursday that Brian Shivambu had been ordered on August 6 by the High Court in Johannesburg to repay the bank’s curators a debt of R2.78 million.

He reportedly already paid R1 million of this money at the court for a business loan related to a wine bar and restaurant in Soweto. He apparently received the R2.1 million business loan from VBS before they went under due to a massive looting spree on depositors’ funds.

Shivambu reportedly still owes R1.78 million and conceded he would pay this too after earlier “indicating that he would oppose [the liquidator’s] request”.

“The loan seems to have been irregular from the start,” wrote investigative journalist Pauli van Wyk. She added that the circumstances around the loan “”may well amount to fraud”.

The VBS looting saga continues to be criminally investigated, though no arrests have yet been made.

Last year in October, Brian denied that he had anything to hide when it came to an amount of more than R16 million that a Reserve Bank investigation found he had received improperly from VBS.

His name was included in a list of more than 50 people the Reserve Bank wanted criminally charged and investigated.

Brian claimed in a statement that his company, Sgameka Projects, merely provided “professional consulting services to Vele Investments in 2017”, but did not receive money from the bank.

The younger Shivambu complained that he had never been contacted by the VBS Mutual Bank investigators to offer his side of the story and felt he had been defamed.

He threatened that he would sue, but to date has not done so.

Brian received R16,148,569 in “gratuitous payments” from VBS, according to Advocate Terry Motau, who was appointed by the bank to probe the collapse of VBS after it was placed under curatorship.

Motau, assisted by Werksman Attorneys, found that there was “wide-scale looting and pillaging of the monies placed on deposit at VBS”. The monies were clients’ life savings and deposits, including millions of rands improperly deposited by municipalities.

The report, titled “The Great Bank Heist” showed that at least 50 people “gratuitously” received R1.894 billion from the bank over a three-year period starting in March 2015.

(Edited by Charles Cilliers)

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