Caryn Dolley
THE Living Hands fund for orphans promised to be “a helping hand to the living, bringing life and hope to families”.
But Siphe Mhlutwa’s family are still waiting to be paid what is due to them after their father died. Holding a tattered Living Hands newsletter, dated 2005 and with the signature logo of a hand cradling a baby’s feet, Mhlutwa, 27, a security guard living in Kayamandi, Stellenbosch, said his family had only received one payout from the fund in roughly six years.
The Living Hands Umbrella Trust, a provident fund for orphans whose mother or father died while employed, is one of four trust funds which lost investments worth more than R1.3 billion when Fidentia and its associated companies were placed under curatorship in 2007. Former Fidentia chief executive Arthur Brown faces sentencing tomorrow on two separate fraud counts involving misrepresentation.
More than 80 percent of R1.1bn misappropriated from Living Hands has not been paid out to beneficiaries of the trust.
Over the six years since Fidentia and its associated companies were placed under curatorship, the nearly 60 000 beneficiaries either went without monthly payments for years or received a trickle of money – a fraction of what had been invested for them.
Some beneficiaries are yet to be tracked down for them to claim their money.
Speaking outside his shack, Mhlutwa said two of his sisters were Living Hands beneficiaries and should be receiving money monthly.
But since about 2007 only one amount – R2 100 – had been paid into his mother’s bank account for them, on February 20. Neither he nor his mother knew when money would be paid out again.
According to Living Hands “trust status” letters from October 2005 which Mhlutwa has meticulously kept:
l His sister Ntombentsha, a beneficiary since 2002 until April 2015, had a trust account value of R16 757.77 and monthly income payment of R127.
l His other sister, Kutho, a beneficiary since 2002 until November 2022, had a trust account value of R28 120.87 and monthly payment of R177.
Both sisters were beneficiaries until age 21, as Mhlutwa himself had been.
The Cape Times calculated that if both sisters had been paid monthly from January 2008 until this month, together they would have received R19 760, more than nine times
the R2 100 Mhlutwa said his mother received in February.
Mhlutwa said he had faxed the Living Hands trust a number of times, but had no reply.
He rarely had e-mail access.
Asked whether he had heard of Fidentia, money being misappropriated from the fund, the related court case, or Brown, Mhlutwa replied: “No”.
His father, a former road worker for Paarl municipality, died in 2001 and Mhlutwa and his family relied heavily on the Living Hands payouts as their mother was unemployed. She lives in the Eastern Cape.
His brother Yanga was stabbed to death in 2006.
Mhlutwa moved to Cape Town five years ago to look for work to support his mother and sisters as the payouts from Living Hands had suddenly stopped the year before.
“I keep trying to find out what happened to the money, but I don’t know.”