Much like a modern-day Houdini, local businessman Gary Patrick Porritt has managed to squirm his way out of some pretty tight spots over the past few decades.

Porritt now faces 3 160 fraud charges connected to the disappearance of more than R160 million of investment funds.

And though he was arrested in late 2002, his criminal trial seems no closer to conclusion today than when he was arrested almost a decade ago.

If it ever gets to full trial, the Porritt case is likely to be highly complex and stretch out over at least three years. Supreme Court of Appeal judges reckon that more than 3 000 witnesses will be needed and that the judge will have to study roughly a million pages of evidence.

Some of the elderly witnesses are reported to have died already.

Most recently, Porritt popped back into the limelight following a heated dispute with neighbouring farmers, who challenged his attempts to drive nearly 2 000 cattle through their land to reach pasturage on the Lesotho border.

Though he has spent his adult working life in Pietermaritzburg, Joburg and farms in the Swartberg area, Porritt grew up in Pietermaritzburg, the son of prominent estate agent and businessman Douglas Barrington Porritt.

His grandfather Stanley Herbert Porritt was a founder member of the law faculty of the University of Natal and his great-grandfather owned a wagon and coach-building business in Pietermaritzburg in the 1880s.

His teenage years were spent at Maritzburg College, one of the province’s oldest schools, and in 1968 he was appointed head boy.

After leaving College, he became an accountant, but in the late 1970s he decided to pursue his “life-long ambition” to become a farmer.

Judge Hilary Squires was to comment some years later that Porritt had taken the approach and talents of an accountant into the more conservative world of agriculture and demonstrated “remarkable entrepreneurial vigour”.

Yet after amassing at least nine farms sprawling out over more than 8 000ha, Porritt’s agricultural empire crashed in spectacular fashion when almost R5 million of debt began to roll in during the early ’80s from scores of creditors.

“It’s a hell of a thing to build up a farming empire like this from nothing in seven years and rub it all out,” he told the Sunday Tribune in 1985.

“I was once supposed to be sitting with a fistful of cash. Then I found that I did not have two tickies to tinkle in a tin.”

During one of his first recorded brushes with the law (late payment of a mortgage bond in 1983), Porritt insisted to the judge that he had made his payment on time, but the cheque seemed to have got lost.

After his final sequestration in 1986, his wife, Bernice Lynn Porritt (nee Knight), rushed to the courts in an attempt to stop the liquidators from seizing a BMW, furniture and money which she claimed belonged to her, not Porritt.

A court report at the time suggested that the couple were married out of community of property.

It was also around this time that the Gary Patrick Porritt Children’s Fund came into being. Porritt was reported to be a trustee at one point, and the trust owned 15 farms in the Kokstad area.

In 1989, Porritt tried to persuade Judge Squires that he was ready to be rehabilitated from insolvency – but the judge was not convinced and noted that Porritt’s expenditure showed an unsatisfactory situation for an insolvent, particularly in regard to his new company Effective Barter (Natal) (Pty) Ltd.

Token

“It shows that the cash generated by that company is being used to his (Porritt’s) benefit and to the exclusion of creditors.

“It is true that to pay his accumulated debts on his present resources would be like trying to stop a large river with a bucket and spade and any payment would be a token,” said Judge Squires.

The judge also observed that Effective Barter seemed to be doing well enough to have lent Porritt’s wife R70 000.

Porritt evidently returned to business a short while later because, in 1994, the Porritt companies Effective Barter Natal and EBN Trading became entangled with the Commissioner for Customs and Excise in a complex dispute over the non-payment of almost R4.4m in customs duties for a consignment of Korean video cassette recorders imported into Durban via Hong Kong.

EBN lost the case and went to the supreme court, which eventually dismissed EBN’s appeal in February 2001.

Not long after this, Porritt was implicated in the famous Tigon/PSC Guaranteed Growth Ltd scandal.

Shortly stated, it was alleged that more than R160m invested in PSC disappeared into the Porritt-associated business entities EBN Trading and Awethu Trust.

Porritt was arrested in December 2002 and his business partner Susan Hillary Bennett was arrested in March 2003.

Almost two years after Bennett’s arrest, senior members of the SAPS obtained search warrants and seized roughly 400 000 documents from Porritt’s home at Hlani Farm, Swartberg, at Tigon offices in Joburg and also from 218 Boom Street and an office in Loop Street, Pietermaritzburg.

Porritt’s attorneys soon went to court, seeking to set aside the search warrants, to have documents returned and to interdict the police from copying or using any of the seized documents as evidence.

Eventually, almost 18 000 documents were returned to Porritt and Bennett on the basis that they were privileged documents.

Their legal representatives argued that the unlawful seizure of even a single privileged document tainted the seizure of all the documents, which should therefore all be returned. Though the Pretoria High Court ordered the return of all the documents, this decision was overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2010.

In the interim, the cost of preliminary legal skirmishes had been mounting up steadily and by May 2007, Porritt and Bennett had no formal legal representation.

It was at this point that Porritt and Bennett managed to pull off a quite sensational stunt, when they persuaded Pretoria High Court Judge Geraldine Borchers to grant them free State legal aid.

They argued that their legal costs now stood at around R23 million and their funds had dried up.

The legal costs, according to Porritt, had been funded hitherto by certain trusts of which he was “a discretionary beneficiary”.

These trusts, he declared, had resolved to withdraw their financial support and to distance themselves from the criminal trial involving 3 160 counts of fraud.

Porritt and Bennett then applied to the Legal Aid Board for free legal representation, but the board declined, saying it was not convinced that they were entirely penniless.

Judge Borchers also seemed sceptical and was “concerned at the delays that had plagued the trial since its inception”.

According to court papers, Judge Borchers remarked that Porritt and Bennett were both well-groomed and carried cellphones, and did not present the picture of the “usual indigent person”.

She then required them to answer several questions about their financial affairs which they had consistently refused to disclose to the Legal Aid Board.

Value

In response to questions on directorships and shareholdings, Porritt and Bennett declared that neither had any shares “of any material value”.

Asked to declare whether they had any income “from any source whatever”, both answered “nil”.

Porritt asserted that he was dependent on his wife and four children for his normal living expenses. He said he lived rent-free in a house in Pietermaritzburg owned by his son. His cellphone was paid for by the Snowdon Farm Trust, to which he provided “technical advice and assistance” for its farming operations.

Bennett lived in a house in Knysna valued at R5.8m. Though the house was owned by a company in which she was the sole director, the sole shareholder was the Colisseum Trust.

Her lodgings and living expenses, she declared, were provided by an elder daughter.

Porritt was also asked to identify the trusts which had previously funded their R23m legal expenses.

He responded: “It is my understanding that this was routed ultimately through the Gary Patrick Porritt Children’s Trust, although the Boom Street Trust and the Snowdon Farm Trust may have provided some assistance.”

He described himself as a “discretionary beneficiary” of the Children’s Trust. The Boom Street Trust had stood surety, while the Snowdon trust might have had a loan from the children’s trust.

Yet a Cipro companies registration search had revealed that Porritt had been a director of 17 companies (10 of which were still active). Records suggested that Bennett had been a director of 23 companies (19 of them active)

Further enquiries revealed a further “veritable web of trusts”.

The Gary Patrick Porritt Children’s Trust had been founded by his father about 28 years ago for the benefit of the grandchildren, although it could provide some funds to Gary and Bernice for their “maintenance and reasonable pleasures in life”. In addition, Porritt and Bennett were trustees of the Surrey Farm Trust, the Colisseum Trust, and Moneyline 696.

Porritt and Bernice were also trustees of Surrey Development Trust and there was also reference to the Boom Street Trust, founded by a Mr CD Harris. The trustees were Bernice Porritt and Mr KH Knight (thought to be a relative of Bernice).

Faced with this complex web of information, Judge Borchers expressed concern that she did not have the machinery to “investigate the correctness of the information supplied”.

Reluctantly, she granted the pair free legal aid, but expressed the hope that the matter would be decided by the highest level of the courts.

And indeed it was.

The Legal Aid Board went on appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal, and in a judgment handed down in September 2010, Judge Visvanathan Ponnan declared that the answers provided by Porritt and Bennett illustrated “a complete lack of candour”.

He noted that the Legal Aid Board had argued that Porritt and Bennett had “deliberately structured their affairs in such a way to facilitate the disposal or concealment of their assets”.

Judge Ponnan observed that there was much to be said for this contention, but it was unnecessary for his court to go that far.

However, it was clear that the pair had adopted an intractable attitude in refusing to answer questions by the board – and when they were eventually compelled to by Judge Borchers, their answers were “deliberately evasive and cagey”.

“Given the information supplied by them, one is none the wiser as to why the trusts (or indeed which ones) furnished as much as R23m for various preliminary legal skirmishes. And why they are no longer willing to fund the defence of either in the criminal trial proper.”

Judge Ponnan said it was likely that the defence costs for the criminal trial proper would amount to a lot less than R23m.

“A more pragmatic utilisation of the funds at their disposal from the outset would have rendered their application for legal aid unnecessary.

“But as has been made plain both in this court and the one below they intend to employ every legal stratagem available to them in order to delay the commencement and thereafter continuation of the trial for as long as they possibly can.”

While they might be entitled to follow this course, there could be consequences, he remarked, before yanking their free legal aid.

Yet the saga is far from over. The main trial has not started.

In September last year, Judge Borchers eventually pulled out of the case, commenting that she had had far too much “intimate contact” in her court with Porritt and Bennett over the past five years and she might have “formed certain impressions which are not favourable to some of the parties”.

Since her recusal, a new judge (Lucy Mailula) has been appointed and the pair are due to appear in court again on March 5.

Yet it appears that a new stratagem has already been formulated – to demand the recusal of the prosecuting team of Etienne Coetzee and Jan Ferreira.

Happily for Porritt and Bennett, it appears that their “discretionary” legal lifeboat may have sailed back to their assistance.

Services

Business Report wrote recently that the pair had engaged the services of Kemp J Kemp (President Jacob Zuma’s former senior advocate) at an estimated minimum cost of R25 000 a day for each court appearance.

l When The Mercury called Porritt yesterday to verify certain factual issues and offer him the opportunity to comment on the reasons for the delay in his fraud trial, he responded: “Well, maybe you should first correct the errors in your last article. My attorneys are sending a letter… I’m not a party to the litigation.”

Asked whether he was not in fact the complainant in the criminal charges lodged recently against five neighbouring landowners and farm managers in a route access dispute in the Swartberg district, Porritt responded:

“The criminal case? No, look, just deal with the correspondence sent by the Snowdon Trust first.” He then put the phone down.

The Mercury called back 10 minutes later and his cellphone switched to answering machine.

A message was left, explaining that The Mercury wanted to offer him the opportunity to comment on the reasons for the nine-year delay in his criminal trial for fraud and other matters. He did not return the call.