Cape Town - Two trusts linked to businessman Herman Pretorius, who shot dead his former business partner, Julian Williams, and then turned the gun on himself at a Foreshore office block on July 26, were provisionally sequestrated after two separate applications in the Western Cape High Court this week.
The applications come just more than three weeks after Pretorius’s Relative Value Arbitrage Fund (RVAF) was sequestered in the same court, in an application which revealed that RVAF owed thousands of investors, mainly farmers, as much as R1.8 billion.
Court papers in that application indicated that RVAF operated much like a pyramid scheme.
However, in papers placed before the court in one of the applications this week, it emerged that an additional trust, called the Seca Trust, performed administrative services for the Abante Investment Group, a group of entities controlled by Pretorius.
In an affidavit, insolvency practitioner Lambertus von Wielligh Bester said bank statements showed that money invested in the RVAF Trust was used on a monthly basis to pay the salaries of the employers of the Seca Trust.
In addition, the bank statements indicate that, on a monthly basis, payments totalling hundreds of thousands of rands were made to “H Pretorius”. While auditors were unable to confirm it, the only logical conclusion was that the money was paid to Pretorius himself, he said.
The bank statements also indicate that R1.7m was paid to Aston Martin Cape Town. Pretorius drove an Aston Martin.
Bester said it was clear that there was a pattern which showed that as much as R99.7m was paid to the Seca Trust, which was used to pay Seca’s expenses.
He added that the majority of the funds in the RVAF bank account came from investors.
According to the audited figures, the Seca Trust owes RVAF at least R64.6m, but the amount was likely to be as much as R99m, without interest, Bester said.
The other trustees of the Seca and RVAF trusts have indicated that they were not aware of the manner in which the finances were being held, he added.
He said that trustee Eduard Brand has confirmed that, aside from an amount of R118 762 in Seca’s bank statements, and a Range Rover vehicle registered in its name, the trust had no other assets that he knew of.
In the second application before the High Court this week, it emerged that investors also pumped as much as R50m into another trust, known as the Abante Trust, of which Pretorius was also a trustee.
Hermon farmer David Lombard said that he and other investors were promised high returns on investments.
Lombard is one of the trustees of the Lombard and Dalom Trusts, and he was joined in the application by the remaining trustees.
He said that in April last year the Lombard Trust invested R500 000 in Abante, while the Dalom Trust invested an additional R500 000. On the same date, he personally invested a further R500 000 and his wife invested R200 000.
He added that the features of the RVAF and Abante trusts were indicative of a fraudulent pyramid scheme, which required investigation.
According to Lombard, financial statements obtained on July 28 - just two days after Pretorius took his life - revealed there was only R3m left in Abante’s Absa account, while a mere R30 000 was all that remained in its Nedbank account.
Judge Siraj Desai this week placed both the Abante and the Seca trusts under provisional sequestration.