In a 96-page report, Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane has supported a complaint brought by the EFF, roundly castigating Financial Services Board officials for a wide variety of failures over a decade and more.
Mkhwebane has been pilloried for previous interventions in matters of finance, but this report will arguably boost her standing and its findings are likely to get wide support from the industry, which has for years complained in hushed tones about the bizarre and at times threatening approach of the FSB, which until recently oversaw the non-banking side of the financial services industry.
Yet, at the heart of the report lies longstanding critiques from the press and the industry made against Tshidi for his very close relationship with a high-profile attorney, Tony Mostert, who contrived to corner a fantastically lucrative market working on an unusual set of pension funds assigned to him on the advice of Tshidi.
The issues involved go back a decade and more. But the central allegation that emerges from the report is that Mostert kept getting appointed a curator of various troubled pensions funds, and in addition managed, for reasons not clarified in the report, to get a fantastically and suspiciously lucrative mandate from the board.
But the report says that by 2011, Mostert was alleged to have earned in person and/or through his firm, close to R240-million over the previous six years. Further, it was suggested that the amounts earned by Mostert between 2011 and 2019 were not known, as both Mostert and Tshidi steadfastly refused to make any disclosure whatsoever of the amounts earned.