For more than a year, the country’s second-largest medical scheme has insisted that concerns about its procurement practices and governance are unfounded, unfair or the product of this columnist’s imagination.
The Council for Medical Schemes (CMS), the regulator meant to be the public’s bulwark against this sort of thing, adopted much the same tone. That was until it finally announced last week that there is enough smoke to warrant a “forensic investigation”.
One of the most striking elements in this saga is not the content of the new whistleblower files, but the age of the earliest warning. In July 2024 a Bonitas member sent a detailed complaint to the council and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, copied major newsrooms and asked for an urgent investigation into what they described as a “hostile takeover” of Bonitas’ marketing tender by former AfroCentric Distribution Services CEO Tobie du Preez.
Even then, the signs were unmistakable: a sudden resignation, a sudden re-emergence with a newly created company and a tender process that seemed to produce a foregone conclusion. The member asked direct questions about tender integrity, conflicts of interest and corporate governance.
The council received that email, acknowledged it and, astonishingly, did not classify it as a complaint or a tip-off because “no allegation of wrongdoing was made”.
Let’s put this breathtaking bureaucratic sleight of hand to one side for a moment.
In recent weeks, as the whistleblower’s flash drive surfaced and industry insiders began approaching me quietly, the responses from Bonitas, the council and the scheme’s attorneys took on a more defensive edge.
Choosing to play the man and not the ball, Bonitas released a circular to brokers accusing me of bias and unethical conduct, insisting its procurement processes were impeccable and that nothing irregular had happened. And GMI Attorneys, the firm advising the scheme, responded with a lawyerly explanation of why its attorney’s participation in presenting Project StepAhead to the board should not be seen as a conflict.
What none of them did, apart from the council, was ask to see the documents.
Much of what has now come to light places Project StepAhead at the centre of the alleged capture. Documents show that the strategy used to justify reconfiguring Bonitas’ sales and marketing functions was shaped by individuals who later stood to benefit from the tenders that flowed from it.
GMI attorney Aneesa Mahomed, who co-presented Project StepAhead to the Bonitas board alongside documents prepared by Du Preez (whom she said was hired as a consultant to Bonitas), insists that no conflict existed because the presentation occurred before the board decided to issue a request for proposals.
This logic would suggest that as long as insiders participate early enough in shaping the strategy, their influence is uncontaminated by the fact that they later benefit from the environment they helped design.
It’s the sort of thing only a lawyer could say with a straight face.
A bank confirmation letter dated July 31 2025 has surfaced, confirming that WHB Holdings, a company whose directors are Willem Britz Snr and Willem Britz Jnr, committed to making R150m available to Private Health Administrators (PHA) should it win the remaining Managed Care and Administration Services. In other words, the rest of the plan options are not yet administered by PHA.
The same tender that insiders said was engineered through StepAhead is now at the centre of the council’s forensic investigation.
For a year, Bonitas has insisted publicly that it does not do business with Britz. This letter suggests the opposite.
It also reinforces what whistleblowers have said privately: that Britz is the real beneficial controller behind a constellation of Marara-linked entities from Agile to PHA and associated intermediaries, and that tenders awarded to these entities were anything but independent.
A key insight from the leaked documents that draws GMI’s conflict of interest in and shows Britz and Bonitas Medical Fund principal officer Lee Callakoppen’s collaboration is that before Project StepAhead was agreed to by the board, they met to specifically discuss it. And what followed from that meeting was Mahomed and Du Preez executing the board presentations. This appears to point to the scheme attorney and the principal officer knowing and working with Britz directly on matters related to the scheme. This piece of evidence, along with the bank guarantee, is significant.
Just as this picture was settling, another wandering albatross dropped a set of allegations that if ever corroborated suggest the Bonitas saga may be a chapter in a much longer book, suggesting too that Bonitas never really recovered from its previous scandals and period under curatorship.
According to the source, the business dealings around Britz stretch back more than a decade and involve bitter fallouts, litigation, failed deals and individuals who were, in their words, “ruined” by him. One of those named, Dewald Dempers, a former Afrocentric executive, allegedly left behind recordings and documents before taking his own life in Germany — materials some in the industry apparently refer to as “Die Koffer”, the suitcase.
These claims are unverified. I have not seen the recordings or the documents.
The same source referenced ongoing litigation involving Britz and former associates and raised the involvement of Gert van der Merwe, a lawyer previously linked to the Gupta network, in disputes within the health administration sector. Again, these are allegations that require verification and must be treated with caution. But they highlight why so many insiders now say, privately, that the Bonitas story did not begin in 2023.
And now the council has finally conceded that the matter warrants a forensic inspector on site, not a polite exchange of letters. Whether it is doing so because the evidence is overwhelming or because the public scrutiny is now unavoidable almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that the cover story has collapsed.
The regulator has six months and all eyes will be on who is appointed to investigate this sordid mess.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.
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