Slain insolvency attorney Bouwer van Niekerk fielded death threats as he and his team worked doggedly on the business rescue of NTC Global Trade Fund, a firm suspected of being party to Ponzi scheme activities.
NTC’s sole director, Edwin Letopa, has played hardball with the business rescue practitioners, denying them management control of the firm in the high court in Johannesburg last month, which was described as an aberration.
The brazen slaying of Van Niekerk in his office on Friday seems to have worked in getting his colleagues to step away from following NTC’s money, allegedly siphoned from an unsuspecting public.
This is after high-profile insolvency expert Kurt Robert Knoop quit as NTC business rescue practitioner just hours after Van Niekerk was gunned down. His resignation letter indicates he and Van Niekerk had received death threats related to their NTC work.
“Following the circulars dated August 12 and August 18, I hereby inform affected persons that my attorney and I received further death threats.
“After this morning’s shooting of my attorney, and in the interests of the safety of all parties concerned, I have elected to immediately give effect to my initial intention to resign as the business rescue practitioner of NTC,” the letter dated September 5 reads.
The murder of Van Niekerk and the hasty exit of Knoop are a direct assault on the rule of law. It has exposed a chilling vulnerability in SA’s business rescue framework, turning what should be a court-mandated probe into a suspected Ponzi scheme into a hollow threat and leaving creditors and investors exposed and public funds lost.
Knoop is an industry veteran with 36 years of experience, having been involved in some high-profile insolvency matters looking to recover stolen public money, including by the fugitive Gupta family.
Such attacks strike at the very heart of our justice system and undermine the safety and confidence of all professionals who dedicate their careers to upholding fairness, accountability and due process in SA.
— SA Restructuring and Insolvency Practitioners Association
In many of his matters, he was instructed by SmitSew (formerly Smit Sewgoolam Incorporated) — a law firm Van Niekerk has been associated with for about 15 years.
The resignation of Knoop as NTC’s business rescue practitioner is part of a troubling trend of insolvency experts driven out of investigations through strong-arm tactics and in fear of their lives.
In 2023, Peter van den Steen, the then court-appointed curator for Optimum Coal, resigned after he and his family received death threats.
The Optimum Coal Mine and the Optimum Coal Terminal were owned by the state capture-linked Gupta family before being placed into business rescue in 2018. Coincidentally, Knoop was one of Optimum’s business rescue practitioners.
Reflecting on Van Niekerk’s callous slaying, the SA Restructuring and Insolvency Practitioners Association (Saripa) said the murder had left the industry shocked.
Weakening justice system
The killing comes as the sector is still reeling from the unsolved murders of Cloete Murray and his son, Thomas, just more than two years ago.
The industry is now calling on authorities to come to its rescue, warning that failure to do so weakens the country’s justice system.
Saripa said Bouwer was a respected legal professional who worked on complex, high-profile matters that were often incriminating.
It is heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable that in SA, courageous, ethical professionals should have to pay with their lives simply for doing their jobs
— Jo Mitchell-Marais, Saripa chair
“Such attacks strike at the very heart of our justice system and undermine the safety and confidence of all professionals who dedicate their careers to upholding fairness, accountability and due process in SA,” the body said in a statement.
“Saripa will be engaging directly with the relevant authorities to raise our concerns, and to demand that the safety of legal and insolvency professionals is given urgent and serious attention. Our members must be able to carry out their work without fear or intimidation and violence.”
Insolvency experts play a critical role in restructuring distressed businesses and under the Insolvency Act and the Companies Act have powers and duties to investigate and interrogate the trade dealings and affairs of the company to maximise the payout for creditors.
This often means they have to dig deeper to trace misappropriated funds and assets, a process that often leads to uncovering shoddy dealings that perpetrators would like hidden forever.
Due to the specialised skills the business rescue practitioners bring and the small pool of experts in the country, the seemingly successful strong-arm tactics deployed by ruthless businesspeople risk driving good practitioners away from the industry.
By May last year, there were only 316 registered business rescue practitioners in SA.
“It is heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable that in SA courageous, ethical professionals should have to pay with their lives simply for doing their jobs,” said Saripa chair Jo Mitchell-Marais.
What is NTC?
The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) in May 2024 warned the public against Letopa and his associates, Marius Venter and Sakhile Matsimela, and businesses linked to them: NTC and Arbitrawallet, a cryptocurrency platform.
“The FSCA reasonably suspects that the investigated parties may be conducting unregistered financial services. The investigated parties are not authorised to render any financial services under any financial law,” the watchdog said at the time.
“The FSCA is currently conducting an investigation in respect of the investigated parties. The purpose of the investigation is to establish whether the investigated parties are conducting unregistered financial services business. The investigation is ongoing.”
By the time of the FSCA warning, Letopa had already moved to put NTC in business rescue, a legal ploy used by financially distressed businesses to delay liquidation or frustrate creditors, rather than genuinely restoring the company’s solvency.
Letopa registered the business rescue application with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission in March 2024. This was after a group of investors sought NTC’s liquidation.
Death after discovery
Van Niekerk’s murder came just 20 days after the high court in Johannesburg ordered Letopa to hand over to Knoop and his team several pieces of sensitive information, which could ultimately be self-incriminating.
The information includes usernames and passwords and “all other security measures or requirements to enable the second applicant [Knoop] to access, view and exercise full management control over the funds of the first applicant and its debenture holders held and traded on Pionexbot.com”.
The court also ruled that Letopa shared full details of the source of the R30m invested but not transferred to the Arbitrawallet platform as requested by Knoop in May.
Why this matters
- The murder of Bouwer van Niekerk is the third violent attack on insolvency professionals in just over two years.
- It highlights how business rescue cases involving suspected fraud and Ponzi schemes have become life-threatening in SA.
- With only 316 licensed practitioners as of May 2024, intimidation risks driving experts out of the field, weakening protections for investors and creditors.
- Failures by the NPA to act decisively against financial crime leave practitioners dangerously exposed.
Letopa was also ordered to give Knoop sight of “correspondence, agreements, invoices and any other documents exchanged” between NTC and Arbitrawallet, Pionexbot.com, Pionex.com, Voxitrade and “any other cryptocurrency exchanges” over the period December 2022 to June this year.
Knoop, and by extension Van Niekerk, would also have had access to consolidated accounting of all monies paid or transferred from NTC’s FNB account from December 2022 to March 2024.
Letopa was further ordered to provide a consolidated accounting of all monies paid or transferred from NTC’s Capitec business account from December 2022 to June, among other information.
It was not immediately clear if the crucial information was handed over by the time of Van Niekerk’s death and Knoop’s resignation. What is clear is that from at least early August, pressure was piled on the two men to abandon the matter.
In a judgment handed down on August 15, the high court was scathing about Letopa’s conduct.
“The conduct of Mr Letopa in this case reveals another way in which treating business rescue proceedings that follow from the filing of a resolution contrary to section 129(2)(a) [a resolution to place a company in business rescue] as a nullity can lead to an aberration,” reads the judgment by acting judge Hein van der Merwe.
“Mr Letopa was for a time clearly content with the notion that NTC is in business rescue and that Mr Knoop was its business rescue practitioner. It goes against one’s sense of justice to permit him to now upend matters by relying on his own conduct in breach of section 129(2)(a).”
NTC’s version is that it raises capital by issuing debentures (unsecured debt instrument that companies and governments use to raise funds), which a debenture holder acquires for a fixed cost through the Arbitrawallet platform, and that it does not use the amounts paid by later debenture holders to repay earlier debenture holders.
According to NTC, about R480m has been raised through the debentures.
NPA found wanting
The application by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for a forfeiture of assets belonging to Letopa and associated entities failed in March. This was after the high court in Johannesburg found the case was incoherent and devoid of any merit.
“It is not for this court to conjure up a case for the NDPP, [national director of public prosecutions],” the court found. “The Ponzi scheme allegations are also not established. The NDPP has not furnished any evidence to prove that any of the respondents use funds from later debenture holders to repay earlier debenture holders.”
Letopa could not be reached for comment. However, he told Business Day’s sister paper the Sunday Times that he too fears for his life. He insisted on Saturday he had nothing to do with the assassination. “This is a very dangerous situation,” Letopa told the Sunday Times. “My partner Marius Venter called me in tears this week. He said his dog had been killed and the killers sent him a bullet with a message saying, ‘You are next.’ This entire thing has been a terrible shock to all of us.”
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