Rogue Unit Skills For Sale

SARS spooks are (discreetly) at large again, with new clients and new masters.

JOHANN VAN LOGGERENBERG, FORMER leader of SARS’s infamous High Risk Investigation Unit (HRIU) and Ivan Pillay, former SARS deputy commissioner and the Revenue Service’s enforcement supremo, have been linked to a shadowy company called Ukhozi Forensics and Consulting Services. And Ukhozi, it is claimed, has been working for a private security firm best known by its acronym BCPS (Basileus Consilium Professional Services), headed by the notorious Warren Goldblatt.

In addition, Anton van ’t Wout, cyber crime expert and former member of Van Loggerenberg’s HRIU, has emerged as a director of a specialist consultancy in cyberforensics and data analytics, named Forensics Consulting. The company also undertakes projects for Goldblatt’s BCPS, as well as for SARS, law firms Werksmans and Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs, banks Absa, Nedbank and Standard, and, inevitably, KPMG.

Van ’t Wout, 48, joined SARS and “Skollie” Janse van Rensburg’s embryonic and highly secret National Research Group (NRG) in March 2007. His designation was Specialist (National Enforcement) and he was on grade 7 with annual remuneration of R530,000.

The NRG’s alleged bugging of the offices of the National Prosecuting Authority in an operation called Project Sunday Evenings took place later in 2007. After the existence of the covert NRG was exposed by former member Michael Peega in October 2009, the unit was dismantled and Van ’t Wout was one of six survivors hand-picked by Van Loggerenberg to form the succeeding and equally clandestine High Risk Investigation Unit.

The HRIU was in turn closed down in 2014 following exposure of its existence by Van Loggerenberg’s former lover Belinda Walter. Van ’t Wout stayed on at SARS until he finally resigned in May 2017. He was appointed as a director of Facts Consulting seven months later.