GETBUCKS ESWATINI'S OFFICIAL RESPONSE TO THE FORENSIC REPORT ON ECSPONENT ESWATINI LIMITED
Getbucks Eswatini acknowledges the publication of the forensic report commissioned by the Central Bank of Eswatini (CBE) and prepared by Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Inc.
(CDH) on the collapse of Ecsponent Eswatini Limited. While we recognize the importance of such investigations, we firmly contest the inaccuracies and omissions in the report, specifically regarding the involvement of Getbucks Eswatini and the associated financial transactions. The report, as currently presented, is a complete cover-up as it attempts to localize a primarily South African issue. It is also trying to wrongfully implicate local officers who were deceived by an intricate South African based Ponzi operating as a money laundering scheme.
Overview of Getbucks and the MyBucks Group
Getbucks Eswatini, established as a microfinance institution, aimed to provide small short-term loans to underserving markets. As part of the MyBucks Group, founded by Dave Van Niekerk in 2011, the company sought to lead in financial technology by utilizing AI and other technologies to offer diverse financial products across Africa and other developing regions. Dave Van Niekerk, as the founder and primary force behind Getbucks and MyBucks, held substantial control over their operations.
Despite its rapid growth, MyBucks and its subsidiaries, including Getbucks, faced significant financial controversies, including allegations of mismanagement and fraud, culminating in the collapse of several operations. Getbucks Eswatini was since inception a subsidiary of Getbucks Limited (South Africa), where Dave Van Niekerk was the Executive Chairman/Chief Executive Officer and in control of all the various subsidiaries in numerous countries including Eswatini. Any transactions executed by Getbucks Eswatini were not made without Dave Van Niekerk’s knowledge, consent and approval.
Involvement of Getbucks Eswatini
Evidence indicates that Getbucks Eswatini was a conduit to withdraw approximately E200 million from Ecsponent Eswatini Limited. Approximately E170m of these funds were redirected to Getbucks South Africa, who in turn lent some of these funds to VSS Financial Services (VSS), a management services company and a subsidiary of the MyBucks Group. Whilst some of these funds were repaid back to Ecsponent Eswatini through Getbucks Eswatini, the majority of these funds remain unpaid till to date. Contrary to the assertion made by the CDH Report, the signatories to the Ecsponent Eswatini and Getbucks Eswatini bank accounts were predominantly South Africans based at the FinTech Campus in Pretoria and were under the influence of Dave Van Niekerk and his RSA based management teams that ran both companies on his direction.
Deception by Dave Van Niekerk
Both Getbucks Eswatini and Ecsponent Eswatini were victims of deception by Dave Van Niekerk, who orchestrated a Ponzi scheme where funds were not genuinely invested but were instead diverted to support his management failures within the MyBucks Group and its subsidiaries. The forensic investigation into VSS, which was made available to the CDH investigators, reveals that Van Niekerk received a salary from VSS months before his formal appointment as a director, illustrating his manipulative control over these companies.
CDH omitted and ignored the VSS forensic report, which carries critical evidence and information on how Dave Van Niekerk financed his mismanagement of MyBucks and also financed his lavish lifestyle using the company’s corporate credit card which had a limit of E14m and was fully maxed up. The CDH report neglects to highlight Van Niekerk's mismanagement, which was primarily responsible for VSS's financial downfall. All the evidence is documented in great detail in the forensic report into VSS and is corroborated by other data submitted to CDH, which they blatantly ignored.
To make matters worse, CDH also do not mention their own involvement in the liquidation processes undertaken at VSS yet they advised MyBucks, VSS and Getbucks on the initiation of the process as well as the technicalities of filing for voluntary liquidation. Instead, they incorrectly and deliberately attribute the decision to liquidate VSS to Mr. George Manyere yet he was the one who protested the placement of VSS on voluntary liquidation and requested that this decision be overturned to allow for a forensic investigation.
Moreover, Mr. Manyere was not a director of MyBucks, VSS nor Getbucks at the time of the liquidation of VSS. Getbucks, through ESW Investment Group, intends making comprehensive representations to the Parliament of Eswatini on the VSS liquidation and in particular, the misrepresentations made by CDH report, which are libelous in nature and subject to legal review.
The CDH report further contains additional critical misrepresentations and omissions. For example, CDH excluded interviewing Tim Nuy of Finclusion South Africa who is the former Deputy CEO of MyBucks Group despite that they identified him as a key person of interest in the matter. Finclusion South Africa are the current 51% shareholders of Getbucks Eswatini. Despite making extremely damning findings against Finclusion South Africa, CDH did not seek access to interview them to establish their precise role in this whole matter. Instead, they only considered the version of Dave Van Niekerk, his associates and legal representatives, which was clearly conflicted and biased.
Dave Van Niekerk
Deficiencies in the Forensic Report
The CDH forensic report fails to adequately trace the money flow or identify the individuals who benefited from the fraud. Despite Van Niekerk and his associates’ pivotal role in these entities, the report does not hold them accountable for the extensive financial mismanagement. For instance, in one fiscal year VSS reported employee costs exceeding E63 million, an alarming figure, and this is when Van Niekerk was the sole director. This discrepancy, along with his personal expenditure of over E14 million in credit card expenses, was deliberately overlooked by the CDH investigators yet it was clearly documented in the VSS forensic report which was undertaken independently. By omitting these and other critical details, the report underestimates the scale and complexity of the fraud committed, thus undermining its reliability and effectiveness.
Attempt to Evade Liability
The report appears to be an attempt to shield Dave Van Niekerk from liability, disregarding the significant financial harm inflicted on numerous stakeholders, including the local Investors. We are concerned that the report excludes testimony from key local individuals who provided essential insights into the investigation.
The CDH report recommends that action be instituted against Getbucks Eswatini by the Ecsponent Investors to recover an amount of E106, 699 382.57 owed to them. In making this legally challengeable recommendation, CDH totally discounts the interests of the ESWIG Investors in Getbucks Eswatini. As a consequence, it sets up the Investors who invested under Ecsponent against those that invested under ESWIG, a situation that is untenable. If the Ecsponent and the ESWIG Investors take the bait to fight each other over Getbucks Eswatini, none will be the victor and both parties will be worse off.
Even if the recovery of the Investor’s funds through Getbucks Eswatini were to be possible, the available options of either selling or liquidating the company cannot be in the best interests of either the Ecsponent Investors or the ESWIG Investors. Not only will any action to force a sale or liquidation of Getbucks Eswatini be vigorously opposed as it clearly will not be to the best interests of the local Ecsponent Eswatini and ESW Investment Group Investors, it is in our respective view also a desperate attempt to obscure the true nature of Van Niekerk's fraudulent activities.
The CDH Report in its recommendations also completely negates the role that the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) played in the licensing and supervision of Ecsponent Eswatini, particularly the actions of senior officials of the FSRA. Had the FSRA properly applied itself to their role in line with the FSRA Act and Securities Act, Ecsponent Eswatini would never have existed at all and, if it did, would not have operated beyond its first year of existence. The FSRA allowed a company that had an equity injection of Seven Hundred Emalangeni (E700) to raise and siphon off over three hundred million (E300m) of investor funds from 2014 to 2020.
In reality, the only worthy asset under Getbucks Eswatini currently is its active loan book. Needless to say, if there is a sale or a liquidation, the proceeds will, at the first instance, go to the Senior/Secured Lenders (which excludes the Ecsponent Eswatini and ESWIG Investors). Any balance of proceeds under a sale arrangement for the Investors to share will be very minimal and the situation would be worse under a liquidation process.
The Investors are better off with maintaining Getbucks Eswatini as a going concern as there is a chance that at some point in the future, they will realise their investment. Under a going concern scenario there is also still the urgent need for the Government and the FSRA to facilitate the transfer to the Investors the full ownership of Getbucks Eswatini as proposed by the current shareholders. It is critical that while all options to assist the Investors are being pursued, the ownership of the company fully rests directly with them.
The CDH report gives the impression that a claim against Getbucks Eswatini, while it may be legally possible, is also financially feasible and is in the best interests of the Investors yet the contrary may be true. The report’s recommendations are generally couched in very devious terms ostensibly to assist Dave Van Niekerk to escape accountability for the mess he created in the Kingdom of Eswatini as well as to undermine the ongoing Court processes being pursued against the FSRA and other persons of interest.
Demand for Accountability
Dave Van Niekerk, with his comprehensive knowledge of financial operations, is primarily responsible for the financial collapse that affected numerous investors. The forensic report's failure to expose these details and accurately trace the funds undermines its credibility and efficacy. Similarly to the views expressed by the Investor Relations Committee (IRC) in their public statement released on 7 August 2024, Getbucks Eswatini has full confidence that the Parliament of the Kingdom of Eswatini will deal with the defects in the CDH Report. We will, as a company, avail ourselves to assist the August House in their critical duty, including submitting evidentiary documents to demonstrate the glaring misrepresentations in the CDH Report.
Commitment to Transparency and Justice
The current Board and Management of Getbucks Eswatini appointed in May 2022 as part of the second rescue effort of ESWIG (Project White Knight), remain steadfast in their commitment to transparency and accountability. Both the Board and Management fully acknowledge their role as custodians of the company and that the ultimate beneficiaries must be the Investors who lost money in Ecsponent Eswatini and ESW Investment Group. This overriding imperative is not in dispute save that the Investors must be very weary of the moves to force a sale or liquidation of the company to the detriment of their overall interests and concealment of the truth.
All the decisions taken by Getbucks Eswatini since 2022 have directly benefitted the Ecsponent Eswatini and ESWIG Investors. Getbucks Eswatini has expensed in excess of E40m between 2021 and to date in support of the the ESWIG Investors’ primary commitments. The company had to strike a careful, difficult and complex balance between maintaining the going concern of Getbucks Eswatini while ensuring that ESWIG did not close shop and that met all its short-term obligations.
The support advanced by Getbucks Eswatini has included the following:
- ● Prior to the current Management taking over in May 2022, the support to ESWIG from Getbucks Eswatini had accumulated to about E11m.
The support was extended when the current Management took over the running of Getbucks and specifically focused on the following:
● Payment of dividends to the Ecsponent Eswatini and ESWIG Investors for the period September 2021 – December 2021, amounting E5m.
● The paying off of all twenty five (25) Ecsponent Collective Investment Scheme (CIS) Growth & Income Funds Investors the total investments also amounting to E5m. The last investor under the CIS was paid off in March 2024.
● Payment of the ESWIG creditors, which had accumulated following the company’s liquidity challenges that led to the stopping of the dividends’ payments in December 2021. More than E11m has been paid to date.
● Supporting ESWIG’s monthly working capital requirements including the payment of salaries to staff, rental, communication costs, legal fees to prevent the company from being liquidated following the numerous legal cases it dealt with in the past four years. To date, more than E7m has been channeled to this.
● Supporting the activities of the ESWIG’s Investor Relations Committee including the holding of at least three (3) Annual General Meetings since June 2022 and to date more than E1.3m has been expensed for this cause.
George Manyere
The CDH Report pays scant regard to the efforts that Getbucks Eswatini has devoted since 2022 to support the fate and interests of the Ecsponent Eswatini and ESWIG Investors.
The CDH Report goes to the extent of suggesting that the “relevant authorities must assess the legal relationship between ESWIG, Getbucks Eswatini and current directors to determine if any activities have been undertaken for the purpose of limiting the ability of the Investors from pursuing monies owed to them.” This recommendation is not only insulting to the extreme, it also unnecessarily casts aspersions without any evidence or legal basis on the work done by the Board and Management since May 2022.
It is also devoid of any moral and ethical foundation particularly given that it is made by an organisation that has misrepresented evidence submitted to it and has allegedly gone out of its way to protect individuals that have done heinous crimes of fraud and money laundering on the most vulnerable of society.
How is it practically possible that despite overwhelming evidence of wrong doing, the report “completely ‘exonerates’ Dave Van Niekerk and all of his associates, whilst they themselves indicate in their report that it is incomplete and excludes material witnesses that were not interviewed as well as information they were not able to get access to, as part of this process?
Both the current shareholders of Finclusion (who own 51%) and ESW Investment Group (who own 49%) are fully cognizant of the need to grow the company for the sole benefit of the Investors and have articulated this to the Investors on numerous occasions. In addition, the shareholders have in the past given practical meaning to this by seeking the authorisation to transfer the 51% ownership under Finclusion South Africa to a company that is owned 100% by all the Investors at no cost to them.
The proposed transaction was roundly rejected by the FSRA in October 2023. The rationale of transferring the 51% ownership to a new company on behalf of the Investors was to ensure that it was protected from any ill-intention of liquidation by those hell-bent on blocking the Investors from recovering from their losses.
We urge the relevant authorities to revisit the report's findings and ensure a comprehensive understanding of what occurred so that the true narrative is revealed, and the responsible parties are held accountable. No one must be allowed to ‘tell lies and claim easy victories’ in this matter. The Kingdom of Eswatini must not seek short-cuts to this painful history in the financial services sector, which continues to affect hundreds of Emaswati, eighty-one (81) of whom are now deceased. The truth must be properly unearthed, and the responsible persons must be held fully accountable.
By Order of the Board of Directors - Getbucks Eswatini