The infamous Estina Vrede Dairy Project was supposed to direct public funds to ‘empower’ indigent Free State farmers and develop local agriculture. Instead, almost all of the money was looted to benefit the Gupta enterprise. This week Open Secrets focuses on two of the banks that facilitated this injustice. As shown in The Enablers Investigative Report, it takes more than a few corrupt politicians to capture the state. It requires banks to facilitate suspicious payments and the extraction of money from the country. In the case of Estina, Standard Bank and FNB have questions to answer.
See here: The Enablers Investigave report
In February 2013 Ace Magashule, then Free State Premier and now ANC Secretary-General, used his State of the Province address to make a major announcement: the Free State government would be setting up a “state-of-the-art” dairy farm in the town of Vrede.
Two months later, Gupta family and friends, along with South Africa’s political, economic and media elite, gathered at Sun City to celebrate the wedding of Vega Gupta and Aakash Jahajgarhia. The lavish event prompted one of the first big Gupta-linked scandals when it emerged that guests had been allowed to land at Waterkloof airport, a military installation.
But the wedding involved an even bigger scandal: funds from Magashule’s vaunted dairy project, instead of benefiting local farmers, were laundered into the pockets of Gupta companies to meet the costs of the Sun City wedding. The Enablers explains how audit firm KPMG was centrally involved in assisting the Gupta enterprise to launder stolen Estina funds via the books of the Gupta company Linkway, using the costs of the Sun City wedding to do so.
Subsequent investigations of the project by the Public Protector and National Treasury, together with analysis of the #GuptaLeaks, reveal that the Estina/Vrede Dairy Project was, from start to finish, a Gupta-driven project, established to benefit the Gupta enterprise and loot Free State government funds. An analysis of banking records and other documentation by Shadow World Investigations has revealed that the vast majority of the R280.2-million paid to Estina by the Free State government was transferred into accounts owned or controlled by the Gupta enterprise.
*********
