FORMER DIMENSION DATA FOUNDERS AND EXECUTIVES ACCUSED OF FRAUD HIT BACK
- BEE NEWS
- Aug 5, 2025
- 9 min read
Jan Vermeulen | 4 August 2025
Dimension Data co-founders and former executives Jeremy Ord, Grant Bodley, Saki Missaikos, Steven Nathan, and Doc Watson say the allegations against them of fraud and BEE fronting are false and defamatory.
“These allegations form part of a sustained and sinister campaign launched by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), the Japanese parent company that acquired Dimension Data in 2010,” the executives said.
According to the executives, the campaign against them is to conceal a BEE fronting scheme NTT conceived and implemented in order to exit South Africa.
The executives said it also deflects attention from NTT’s responsibility for the poor performance of its African business.
“NTT’s also aims to excuse this conduct by promoting a malicious falsehood that this was attributable to our corporate malfeasance. Nothing could be further from the truth,” they said.
“We are confident that we will expose the falsity of these allegations in the court cases instituted against us.”
However, according to the executives, NTT and its advisors have seen fit to seek to advance their case outside of court.
This is to damage their good names and reputations, to drum up support for their prosecution. “We have therefore decided to set the record straight,” they said.
Doc Watson and Jeremy Ord co-founded Dimension Data with others in South Africa in the 1980s. They each dedicated more than 35 years of their lives to the business.
Saki Missaikos joined in the 1990s after Dimension Data acquired Internet Solutions. In the early 2000s, Grant Bodley joined as an account manager and worked his way through the ranks to become the CEO of the African business.
Watson, Bodley, Missaikos, and Ord spent effectively all their working lives at the company. In 2018, Steven Nathan was appointed by the NTT Group as an independent consultant.
“Over our hundreds of years of combined service, we have enjoyed an unblemished and sterling track record until NTT launched a coordinated campaign designed to denigrate our good names and reputations,” the executives said.
They said this campaign had numerous objectives, including attempting to undo NTT’s BEE transaction that it had conceived and implemented in contemplation of selling the business to the executives.
The executives also allege that NTT wanted to claw back amounts they had earned over years of service and attribute its own malfeasance to them.
“This is unsurprising as NTT has been implicated in corruption and dishonesty, including the 1990s ‘recruit scandal’, the 2010 bribery probe, and the 2021 government entertaining scandal,” they said.
Allegations and procedural ambush
According to the executives, NTT instituted legal proceedings against them and denied them access to the documents and emails on the Dimension Data servers, which reveal that the claims against them are baseless.
“Rather than launching traditional court proceedings in which we would have been entitled to access to documents and a chance to give evidence and interrogate witnesses, NTT adopted a legal strategy designed specifically to conceal the truth and avoid a fair trial,” they said.
“We have been granted leave to appeal against the judgment of the court which decided that the serious allegations of dishonesty could be decided almost entirely on the basis of selected papers NTT chose to disclose.”
The executives said that evidence that has subsequently come to light further corroborates their version.
“By granting us leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal, the court recognised that there are sound, rational and reasonable prospects of another court coming to a different conclusion,” they said.
“We look forward to the day that NTT’s representatives present themselves to testify, including Messrs Jun Sawada, Tsunehisa Okuno, Aki Hattori, David Sherriffs, Ismail Moola, Barry Curtin, Larry Levin, Hideaki Ozaki and Abhijit Dubey.”
According to the executives, it was significant that the two most senior officials of NTT Holdings, Sawada and Okuno, who were central figures in the management buyout (MBO) discussions, did not depose to affidavits.
“They evidently elected not to corroborate any allegations made by NTT against us,” they said.
“Notably, NTT’s false allegation that the MBO was terminated in 2019 is not corroborated by the people within NTT who would have been best placed to do so, nor in fact by documents they themselves disclosed.”
MBO negotiations
From January 2019 to April 2021, Ord and Nathan engaged in formal discussions to acquire NTT’s African operations in a management buyout. They said this was at NTT’s instance and request.
“NTT decided not to make any reference to the MBO discussions in its founding affidavit in the court proceedings,” the executives said.
“When their attempts to mislead the court were laid bare, NTT further misled the court in asserting that those discussions had ended earlier than was factually the case, to bolster their false version presented to the court.”
From the start of those negotiations, NTT knew that a management consortium had a potential future interest in the Campus, which was an asset specifically identified as one being sold to the MBO Consortium.
“To be very clear, NTT was negotiating the MBO specifically with Steven and Jeremy — on behalf of members of management Jeremy would, in time, identify — to sell the Campus, amongst the MBO assets, to the MBO Consortium,” they said.
“Jeremy personally invited Sonja de Bruyn to be a member of the MBO Consortium and disclosed documents confirm this.”
They allege that Identity Partners remains in possession of about R5 million that was misappropriated from the Fund in 2022, when De Bruyn operated a bank account in its name and after she conceded that she had no authority to represent the Fund.
“De Bruyn’s statements in the media, including that she was ‘misled and taken advantage of’, are false,” they said.
“Her loaded statement that ‘white privileged or powerful men’ abused the BEE structure for our own benefit, is not only false, but also defamatory and designed to distract from De Bruyn’s role in the scheme.”
According to the executives, De Bruyn was involved in proposing and then implementing an NTT BEE front despite their best efforts to prevent that outcome.
BEE Fronting Accusations
“Contrary to the claims against us, it was NTT and its advisors, not us, who developed and implemented a BEE fronting ‘warehousing’ scheme through the use of a vendor-funded private equity vehicle,” the executives said.
“The allegations against us are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the BEE rules that applied in this case.”
The executives said that the identity of the transaction’s funders — the limited partners — is entirely irrelevant under those rules, and for good reason.
“The rules aim to give black fund managers privileged access to capital from all sources,” they said.
“Transformation in this sector could not occur if the investors in the fund vehicles had to be previously disadvantaged.”
They said the truth was that NTT put profit before transformation, when around May 2019, they rejected proposals to effect meaningful transformation through the transfer of equity in the business to previously disadvantaged employees and partners.
“NTT preferred a scheme that relied predominantly on a sale and rent back proposal Identity had proposed and that had been described by the reputable firms of attorneys employed by NTT, as a ‘warehousing scheme,’” they said.
Vendor loan scheme
Ord, Bodley, Missaikos, Nathan, and Watson said that some of them who were involved at the time did their best to ensure that the BEE transaction was legitimate.
“We had every interest in doing so as we were buying the business from NTT, and it made commercial sense to have an enduring transaction and legitimate BEE structure in place when we took over,” they said.
“NTT, together with Identity Partners, structured a secret vendor loan with terms so restrictive that the BEE Fund and any investor in the fund had no meaningful economic interest in the Campus property, undermining the legitimacy of the empowerment transaction.”
They said the fund’s investor was lied to about the terms of the vendor loan, and when it found out about this in September 2022, it filed a complaint with the BEE Commission.
“The BEE Commission now says that this matter needs to be investigated which we fully support,” the executives said.
“We are confident that the BEE Commission will find that it was NTT that abused empowerment and was the architect of a fronting scheme.”
Allegations of misleading regulators and clients
One reason NTT postponed the MBO discussions was that, around the time of the Campus transaction, they lowered the “enterprise value” of the South African business, the executives alleged.
This was to increase the BEE points they would gain from selling the Campus. However, they did not wish to use that lower valuation in the context of selling us the business.
“NTT wanted a low valuation of the business for BEE purposes and a higher valuation in the sale to us,” the executives alleged.
“NTT publicly declared the ratification of the Campus transaction — which is critical to their BEE score — in January 2022 and relied on this ratification in their BEE verification.”
Had a trial been held, the executives said they are confident former Dimension Data CEO Werner Kapp would have confirmed that the transaction had indeed been ratified, consistent with his statements to clients and the media.
“Significantly, NTT relied on the Campus transaction for its BEE rating from November 2019 to September 2022 and then did an about-face,” the executives said.
“They reversed their position under the pretext that their affirmation and recognition of the transaction was no more than ‘crisis management.’”
According to the executives, these were lies and impacted the entire South African consumer market.
Every firm that relied on NTT’s BEE certificates for their own verification, in tenders, or other transactions, was compromised.
“It has now emerged that the unfounded premise of NTT’s version (crisis management) is not only false but untenable,” the executives said.
“The truth is that NTT themselves say that they found out that the transaction was voidable in May 2021.”
However, NTT itself disclosed documents showing they had been considering ratifying the transaction since early November 2021.
“They announced that they had ratified the transaction in January 2022 and they also relied on the ratification until September 2022,” the executives said.
“There was no crisis and no excuse for lying to their customers, the public and regulators.”
Evidently, NTT investigated, realised that the transaction had taken place at market value and was in the best interests of the group and their clients.
“In the context of the failed MBO and our agreement to unwind their participation as a result, the sensible thing to do was to ratify the transaction and proceed with our exit,” the executives said.
“Instead, NTT persists in misrepresenting the BEE rules and advances the false contention that our indirect participation in the limited partner in the Fund — which was irrelevant to the BEE rating — somehow subverted BEE.”
The executives said it was also important to note that once the MBO had failed, they all left the company.
“When contacted by NTT’s then lawyers, HSF, regarding our participation, we tendered the Campus back to NTT with zero gain for us,” they said.
“We had no need for or interest in the Campus without the business.”
Valuation of The Campus
The executives also said there was no merit to the allegation or any evidence that the Campus was sold for less than market value.
“NTT seek to mislead by presenting a book value of R1.6 billion. That value was universally acknowledged as inflated even before a sale of the Campus was proposed,” they said.
“The facts are that the Campus was sold to the highest bidder, it had to be sold within 3 months of the decision to sell, and that the price was within the range of independent valuations obtained for the property.”
NTT was also advised by Standard Bank, Webber Wentzel, Eversheds, property consultants, property valuators and others, the executives said.
“Documents show that NTT personnel, including David Sherriffs, Barry Curtin, Ismail Moola, Aki Hattori, and others, conducted a detailed and lengthy, independent evaluation of the price.”
This evaluation of the property and the entire transaction was conducted before it was approved by management in South Africa and Japan.
Call for transparency
“The real BEE fronting scheme was developed and implemented by NTT and Identity Partners, with the vendor loan serving as a mechanism to retain economic control, while superficially appearing compliant,” the executives alleged.
“In 2019, we were ready to leave NTT, and we stayed on for the sole purpose of pursuing the MBO and rebuilding the business, which NTT did not want, as the African-owned IT icon it had once been.”
After two years of negotiating the MBO, in 2021, the executives terminated discussions and left the company.
“The unequivocal fact is that there were ongoing discussions about an MBO until the discussions were terminated in 2021,” they said.
“Through the MBO, we sought to genuinely achieve meaningful and sustainable broad-based empowerment, as we had done previously. We remain confident that the courts will vindicate our position.”
The executives said that Martin Epstein, a property consultant engaged to assist in managing the Campus, has similarly been unfairly targeted.
They said Epstein is part of a fictitious narrative constructed by NTT to deflect from its own dishonesty.
“Epstein has recently deposed to an affidavit in support of his application to also appeal against the judgment which made damning findings against him,” they said.
“Unfortunately, his affidavit contains a number of materially wrong allegations, certain of which we intend to correct, as we cannot allow them to be placed before the court unanswered.”
‘Disclaimer - The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the BEE CHAMBER’.