BUSINESS NEWS - It’s a common lament that when an investment scheme collapses the victims always try to find someone to blame. How often have we heard the mournful cry of thousands of investors, now badly out of pocket and in some cases penniless, that “someone should have done or said something before the collapse”.
The most recent case was that of Steinhoff, an event that has cost investors an estimated R200 billion and counting. In the same category one could include the Resilient property funds and, going back in time, Sharemax and Pickvest, the two failed property syndicates that were all the rage some 10 to 15 years ago.
More than a decade ago I found myself almost in a fist-fight with the spokesman for Pickvest in the studio of RSG, the Afrikaans radio station. My sin was that I was trying to warn the investing public to stay away from Pickvest as well as Sharemax, as they fell into the same category of investments that I would not recommend.
But what I was doing pales in significance when compared to what Deon Basson and Vic de Klerk did over many years, issuing similar warnings. Basson wrote many articles in Finweek about these schemes and was even busy with a book on Sharemax when he died. I was given most chapters of this book barely a week before he died. I can understand why the Sharemax people paid his estate R400 000 in order to ensure it was never published.
The outrage from the promotors against people like myself, Basson and De Klerk, was predictable. Lawyers’ letters, insults – ‘You are too stupid to understand how this scheme works’ (as I was not an accredited advisor to these schemes) – to a pathetic attempt to try and bribe me with R500 000 in a brown paper bag on condition that I stopped talking and writing about Sharemax. I protected myself from potential lawsuits by simply sticking to a simple strategy, which basically said “I will never invest my own money into this scheme nor the money of any of my clients”.
Hard as they tried, the litigious promotors could not get around this freedom of speech to legally prevent me from saying what I said for as long as I did.
I sometimes feel I should’ve tried harder to get this message out to more unsuspecting members of the public. I console myself with the fact that many people did heed my warning (and those of Basson, De Klerk and also forensic accountant Andre Prakke) and that more people didn’t invest in either of these two failed companies.
