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Barry Sergeant: Roger Kebble suicide – he was trying to make a statement

In this Biznews Special Podcast, Barry Sergeant shares his encyclopedic knowledge of the family which once ruled South Africa’s mining roost, to explain what was behind the suicide this week of family patriarch Roger Kebble. Sergeant, an author who was previously an investment analyst and investigative journalist, first met the family almost two decades back when they sued him after exposing their West African mining scam. He tells Alec Hogg the fascinating Kebble story, including a macabre fact that father and son died in the same Mercedes Benz. Sergeant is convinced that Roger Kebble wanted to make a statement about as yet unexposed forces that engineered his son’s death in 2005.

Well, in this special podcast we’re in conversation with Barry Sergeant – author, farmer, and Kebble expert. As the news breaks that Roger Kebble, the patriarch of the family, died in a way very similar to that of the spectacular assisted suicide of his son Brett, ten years ago. Barry, your involvement with the Kebbles goes back many years. How did it first start?

Alec, it goes back to 1996, by which time I had spent quite a lot of time working overseas in investment. I had spent time in centres such as London, Paris, and New York etcetera but also, off the beaten track in West Africa because that part of the world was emerging as a privatisation zone and there were a lot of gold mines, which had been ruined by nationalisation.

They were coming back into the market. It was in Johannesburg in October 1996 when I noticed that a company, which wasn’t that well known (Randgold and Exploration) published a circular about the acquisition of a gold mine in Mali.

I had a careful look at that and I was aware of the mine. It was a mine that had been opened and operated by BHP, which at that time was already one of the biggest mining companies in the world. By the same token, BHP had shut the mine down because it ran into severe geological problems.

I was interested to read what Randgold was doing and more interested to read that they were paying tens of millions of dollars for a gold mine, which nobody in that part of the world (namely West Africa) would have paid $1.00 for.

I strove to unscramble that transaction to the extent that I could and that is when I first made contact with Brett Kebble who (at that stage) was pretty much an unknown. He was the so-called Marketing Director of Randgold.

How old would Brett have (roughly) been at that stage, Barry?

He would have been in his early thirties. He took this thing very seriously and made no mistake about the tone of his reaction to my enquiry.

I went through some very difficult meetings with Brett Kebble. I was going to meetings where I suppose you could say the design was to intimidate me into buying the story, which had been told to investors on the JSE. That story made no sense.

In other words, investors had been told that Randgold was going to pay tens of millions of dollars for this mine when nobody else that I knew in the world, would pay $1.00 for it.

Why would they do that? What was the motivation?

Alec, there was definitely a grand design in what was going on here. It was one of Brett Kebble’s… not his first, but one of his most significant… what investors know as a ‘flip’.

In other words, you buy something, which is worth next to nothing, and you dress it up in this enormously wonderful suit of light. You then sell it to the market and the market comes running and the share price of a company will go up five or ten times – even more. In the case of Randgold, the share price went up over a period of just over a year, by a tenfold factor.

Make no mistake; people were buying the story. It was very well disguised, but when you read the circular you found that various subsidiaries of Randgold were in fact, buying and selling this worthless gold mine to each other. As the transactions progressed, so the numbers increased.

In other words, it was a paper transaction (or a series of paper transactions), which were used to dupe the market into believing that this was not only a gold prospect, but was an operating gold mine, which in those days, was a big attraction for investors and it had this exotic address in Mali. The name of the mine was Syama.

We can hear that you are no longer in the cities. The chickens are cackling in the background there, Barry. I suppose it’s a much safer place for you to be but it wasn’t very safe at the time that you were taking on this corporate scam (I guess you could call it). How did they try to shut you up?

Well Alec, it was a series of very difficult meetings. At the time, I was working for BOE Security and various senior personnel would attend the meetings with me. Privately afterwards, they would tell me that I’d better go and find other things to do – that kind of thing. I said that I was mandated to do this particular analysis and that I wasn’t going to back off because it was important for investors to know what the facts were behind the story. It’s a listed company and if there was something odd going on, then investors deserve to be told that in no uncertain way. Having said that, in October 1997, Roger Kebble, Brett Kebble and three others sued me for defamation, which in those days, was R500 000 each (R2.5m), but it was a lot of money. It was a huge amount of money. Effectively, what they were trying to do was shut me up and again, I refused to settle or back down on that.

That action continued for about a year or so. Literally, on the steps of the court, the action against me was dropped. I was told by my lawyer that Brett Kebble had opted to pay my legal fees, which I should add, was covered by insurance anyway and at that stage, it amounted to about R1m.

The condition was that nobody be told (and especially, not Peter Flack). I said to the lawyer, “You make up your mind and go ahead with whatever decision you make.” I saw that as an admission by Brett Kebble that he actually got under the mark in trying to intimidate me and shut me down and in a big way, he was apologising to me.

For other reasons as well, apart from the fact that he was a very interesting character… for investment reasons, I subsequently asked to make contact with them in a few months, knowing that he was probably one of the best sources of information in Johannesburg on many topics. In due course, that would also include politics.

Make no mistake; he had a lot of magnetism and he had some grand plans but he was also exceptionally well informed.

Just to close off this part of the story, Syama (the mine that you investigated), what happened to it?

That was rendered by Randgold and Exploration into a new company, called Randgold Resources, which was under the early (and even today) shepherding of Mark Bristow.

Syama was the founding asset for Randgold Resources, which was listed in London in 1997 and two years later, Syama itself would be closed down.

Make no mistake; by that stage, Randgold Resources had found a number of other very good properties in West Africa and it went on in the years ahead, to become one of the most highly rated gold stocks in the world.

Let’s fast forward a little bit to Roger Kebble himself. I recall him being locked up for the night (in jail) after he’d arrived back. I think it was from a trip overseas. He had a vendetta with a gentleman by the name of Mark Wellesley-Wood. At that time Barry, he had a lot of fight in him still. Clearly, for the man to have apparently committed suicide this week, that fight must have gone out of him.

Alec, I understand that this terrible incident happened two days ago, on the 24th of August and I find it eerie that it happened on the 24th of August. Ten years ago, exactly, was the day when Brett Kebble was ejected as chief executive from Randgold Exploration, from JCI, and Western Areas, which were the three key listed companies.

On the same day, Roger Kebble was ejected as the chairperson of Randgold Exploration and of JCI. Exactly ten years after the event, Roger Kebble does that to himself.

Incredible. Roger Kebble of course, being the father of Brett Kebble. At one point in time, they were almost the emperors of the South African mining investment scene. Everybody wanted a slice of them.

Very much so. That could have been close to round about 1991 where Roger Kebble managed to get a controlling interest in Rand Leases on the East Rand and that led to an adventure with an adjoining company, called Durban Roodepoort Deep (DRD).

It was a few years later in 1994, when Roger Kebble made it onto the board of directors at DRD and subsequently, chairperson in 1998. That actually leads into the incident that you referred to just now where some London investors (mainly Mercury Asset Managers) in the late 90’s took fairly significant stakes in a number of South African gold mining companies. DRD was one of them.

Harmony Gold was another. Round about 2000, after quite a lot of controversy around Brett and Roger Kebble, Mercury asked for Mark Wellesley-Wood to be put onto the board of directors of DRD. It was Mark Wellesley-Wood who discovered that things weren’t quite what investors thought they’d been.

That is where a very significant fight broke out. That was between Wellesley-Wood and Kebble and it endured for years. In 2002, when Roger Kebble was arrested at the airport, that was linked directly to the enormous fight that took place in and around DRD.

Just getting back to that 2002 incident, when he came out of it he was full of fire. He was wanting to attack Mark Wellesley-Wood on a range of issues. His son, Brett, was still around and very powerful/well connected politically. Was Roger Kebble the kingpin of this whole web that, as we’ll discover in a little while, started unravelling a few years later?

Very much so. Roger Kebble was (and is still) seen as something of a rogue, but he has a tremendous following. He has a fan base. He really does. Another thing you can just pull out of the hat: he was represented by a number of people. Of course, he was. He was a mine captain.

People always talked Roger upwards. He was someone with a conman charisma. He would drink with the boys and he lived a tough and rough life but at the same time, he was really determined to get to the good life.

He was (and I think remains) seen as somebody who didn’t have what some people mentioned and I talked about just now… the word ‘evil’. They didn’t see him as evil, which they might have seen some of the people around Brett Kebble (like John Stratton) as.

Roger was seen more as a rogue and he had enormous energy, which I think, is what you’re referring to there. He was 78 when he passed away so roughly ten years ago, round about that era, he was not young but he had enormous firepower left in him.

Then we go a few years later to the 27th of September 2005 – almost ten years ago – when the South African mining industry/business community was shaken by the assisted suicide of Brett Kebble. Barry, you know more about what happened there than probably anyone outside of the South African police services. You’ve written a book on it. You’ve gone over the details many times. Just to encapsulate very briefly for us, because it is strange to see the son dying ten years ago in a very similar way it seems, to the father. The son… an assisted suicide in a Mercedes, which was found in a public place. The father… this week, shot himself apparently, also in a luxury Mercedes Benz in a very public place. Are you making any connections between the two?

No, not at all. I think Roger Kebble is trying to make a statement. I do believe his suicide was self-inflicted. Another interesting overlapping factor is that the Mercedes Brett Kebble died in ten years ago was in fact, Roger’s Mercedes.

They both had a Mercedes S600, which is the biggest Mercedes and has a really, big V12. They had the same Mercedes but for various reasons, Brett Kebble was in Roger’s Mercedes. It’s actually the same Mercedes as far as I know that both men died in.

The same car… exactly the same vehicle… That’s extraordinary.

Indeed, so that’s another factor to ponder in what’s going on here. I think the statement Roger Kebble was trying to make was pretty much that after nearly ten years of trying to find out the facts behind Brett’s death, nothing convincing has come to light – certainly not in the public domain.

For Roger Kebble, that must have been extraordinarily frustrating because so many people made so many promises about investigating the matter properly and bringing the facts to light. I think he was saying ‘look, I’m giving up and I’m leaving this’ – extremely disappointed.

The facts that have emerged though, around the death of Brett Kebble… How are you reading it? Was it an assisted suicide by Michael Schultz, Faizel Smith, and Nigel McGurk? That seems to be the story that the public understands.

Alec, there are a number of factors I don’t want to mention at this point in time, even though it’s many years later. In broad terms, I have no doubt in my mind that there were various forces at play, which gathered together at that point in time and that was where Brett Kebble had been thrown out of these various positions. Within a month, he was dead.

He’d been thrown out of the various positions. He had run out of money and his power and influence was pretty much dissipated to the point where it hardly existed.

The only threat that remained from Brett Kebble was that he was going to open his mouth and if he’d done that (and I have no doubt that in time, once he had recovered and to some extent healed himself), that he would not have gone to ground.

He would have said ‘look, this is actually what happened and I’ll explain the influences and the forces that put me into the position that I found myself in’.

If that had come from him, there would have been no hearsay. It would have been from the horse’s mouth. So much of what Brett Kebble knew has, until today, not been put in the public domain.

That is why I think there was a conspiracy to ensure that Brett Kebble’s life was shortened way before its natural potential.

Would any of that information be known to the father, Roger Kebble?

I have no doubt that some of it was but the various bits of information are such that they need to be stitched together to form a fabric, which is convincing. In other words, the knowledge about what happened is still incomplete but for many years, the circumstantial evidence has overwhelmingly pointed to the fact that various people and entities worked together to shorten Brett Kebble’s life. Does that make sense?

It does, indeed. This whole theory of assisted suicide: is it accurate? Is there any truth to it?

No, Alec. I don’t buy the theory of assisted suicide. Apart from anything else, it simply was not in Brett Kebble’s nature. I got to know them both and I remember very well, seeing Brett many times.

At least, on half those occasions, either Roger Kebble was there waiting or we would arrive and Brett Kebble would always make him wait.

I could see that Roger Kebble got very frustrated with that. The reason I’m talking about this is that it gave me a very strong sense of what Brett was about and what Roger was about, and what was going on between them even though I never heard any of their personal conversations.

What I’m trying to say is that knowing Brett Kebble as I did, he would definitely never have opted for the suicide option – never. It was not in his character.

Clearly, the father would know that and know it very well, and so we have Roger Kebble, apparently shooting himself in the head in a public street in Cape Town, in the same car in which Brett died. Do you think he just gave up, Barry? Is this when you stitch all those pieces together, that the forces against him were too big?

Yes, Alec. That’s exactly my reading of the situation. It was the frustration and look, it happens to all of us. We do get to a point in life where we say ‘we’ve had enough’.

Some of us will live out the rest of our days, but we do reach a point where we throw our hands up and we say ‘okay, now I’m definitely retiring’. Some people…one can think of a long list.

One of my favourite authors – Hemingway, for example… Some people decide that when they’ve had enough, they’re actually going to take their own lives.

I think it takes enormous courage to do that at the end of the day – to actually, make that conscious decision and go ahead. As it turns out, Roger Kebble was one of those people but as I said earlier, I don’t think Brett was anywhere near in terms of that particular characteristic.

Getting back to Roger Kebble, so, he’s making a statement. He’s presumably hoping that as a consequence of his death ten years after – to the day – that his son and himself, were ejected from those three listed companies that somebody’s going to look into it. Whom?

Well, that is the biggest question of all. I like to think that in the course of time (and we can’t obliterate history. Nobody can.)

I would like to think that in the course of time, there are going to be enough people with courage to actually take on what happened during the Kebble era and also, perhaps even more importantly, after the Kebble era, which ended about ten years ago up until today.

Unwrap the thing to the extent where the relevant fingers can be pointed in the relevant direction, and those various people and entities be brought to account.

I’m not calling for any crucifixions or anything like that. I’m just saying ‘put these people into the appropriate for a (like the course of law). Let them have their day in a court of law and explain what they were doing, involved in a number of the transactions. Increasingly, as time goes by, I look at these things and re-examine them.

I have almost no question that from round about 1999, Brett Kebble was very much a puppet of various people and entities.

If I can expand it in a way, he was seen as the showman. He was seen as the face. He was seen as the front and there were various people behind him who were making most of the money.

They were providing money. They were providing assets. Most important of all, they were providing stories and some of those stories turned out to be (as you know) complete fabrications. In one of the books I’ve written, there is a series of transactions that I referred to earlier, mentioned.

There are literally dozens of them, which Kebble was involved in, so there were various people and entities that used Brett Kebble as a puppet. Why do I say ‘a puppet’ when somebody had such a strong personality? Well, there’s a very simple answer.

He owed a lot of people a lot of money. When he really started getting going in 1996, he borrowed here. He borrowed there.

He borrowed everywhere and he went further and further into debt. He was basically, permanently fighting his creditors. It was a collection of those creditors who were able to manipulate him, and that’s why I use the word ‘puppet’.

Barry, from our conversation, it sounds like you have some sympathy for the now dead Roger Kebble and the ten-year-dead son, Brett. Is that so?

Alec, I do. I believe that both of them were… It’s difficult to say this, but they were their own worst enemies. That’s a cliché. What I really mean by that is that they were victims to their own success.

Let’s put this in a positive sense. Brett Kebble was born with so many God-given talents. Had he been able to deploy them to a degree that was within the rules, he could have been anything. By the same token, Roger Kebble had a completely different type of talent.

Had he been able to deploy those in ways that were socially, politically, and financially acceptable, he also could have done a lot of things. Not to the extent of Brett, I don’t think because Brett had a vision of what he could have done.

That’s where I get to the fascinating point that there was a very uneasy relationship between father and son. Brett was seen by the father as a somewhat effeminate character whereas the other sun (Guy) was the big, strapping rugby player.

That was Roger Kebble’s kind of man, namely, Guy. In a number of ways, Roger treated Brett in a way that Brett never really appreciated (to put it mildly).

There are a number of people and I’m one of them, who will tell you that Brett was in a situation where he was trying to prove himself to Roger, so there was a love/hate relationship and that is what drove both of them into a situation that they one day found was irreversible. That is where the story is so tragic.

Barry Sergeant – author, farmer, and Kebble expert giving us his insights that come from the writing of books and the interaction over many years with the Kebble family, and the tragic death this week of the patriarch Roger Kebble, who died at 78 of a gunshot wound to the head in the same car that his son died in ten years ago. This has been a special podcast from biznews.com.

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