Secrets and Lies by Marléne Burger & Chandré Gould

Author:Marléne Burger & Chandré Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2002-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

9

Living High on the Hog

BY ANY STANDARDS, the hedonistic lifestyle espoused by Wouter Basson and his handpicked cohorts was extraordinary. As chronicled by a succession of witnesses playing Brutus to his Caesar – and particularly measured against customarily more Spartan military norms – it was an affront to unwitting South African taxpayers who would have to win the lottery in order to aspire to anything even resembling such luxury.

Lacking tangible proof of day-to-day expenditure beyond his means – there were no Gucci loafers or Armani suits in Basson’s closet, no luxury sports cars in the driveway of his unremarkable abode, no priceless artworks on the walls – the prosecution built its fraud case on the premise that at all times, Basson and the WPW Group were one and the same, and that the material benefits he enjoyed accrued from nominal ownership by associates of companies set up for the specific purpose of laundering the proceeds of his alleged crimes.

Faced with overwhelming documentary evidence supporting this scenario, Basson presented a parallel world peopled by financial principals, a motley crew of real or alleged secret agents of several nationalities, and spiced with tales of derring-do dismissed by more than one witness as figments of a rich imagination. Confronted by documents turned up by the forensic audit, Basson simply dismissed them as false, the product of interminable ‘cover stories’ designed to hide transactions in the interest of Project Coast, or claimed he had no recollection of their contents. At one point, senior prosecutor Anton Ackermann’s scepticism caused him to categorise Basson’s accounts of life-threatening exploits as ‘more Austin Powers than James Bond’, and he made no pretence of believing any of the explanations offered for Basson’s global jetsetting.

The first glimpse of this lavish lifestyle came just two weeks into the evidentiary stage of the trial, when attractive blonde architect Lizelle Larson began testifying about the multi-million-rand revamp of Merton House, an art deco property in Pretoria’s diplomatic belt, which was bought by the Zimbabwe government in 1994 to serve as its South African embassy. The minutiae of evidence elicited from Larson and a slew of other witnesses supplied the media with titillating copy for months, and were surpassed only by the attention paid to the horrific accounts of state-sanctioned murder that marked the next phase of the trial.

Larson met Basson through former military psychologist Annette Versluis, who became his second wife in 1991. He told her he represented David Webster, a ‘wealthy American’ who would use the house to accommodate foreign guests and potential investors. Initially, she was authorised to spend R1 million on the project, but over the next three years, both the requirements and the costs escalated dramatically, and the final expenditure was closer to R10 million. In addition to formal living and dining rooms, the house featured four en suite bedrooms and a small first-floor sitting room. A planned gymnasium was never built, but there was an all-weather tennis court, jacuzzi, sauna, billiard room, library, swimming pool and a wine cellar designed to hold thousands of bottles.

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