1958-2017 Barry Sergeant, who has died in Rosendal in the Free State at the age of 58, was a brilliant, fearless and somewhat eccentric investigative financial journalist who exposed in exhaustive detail the crooked dealings of mining executive Brett Kebble and the murky relationships he had with some of the pillars of corporate South Africa. He wrote two magisterial books about South Africa's most notorious conman and his corporate backers, Brett Kebble: The Inside Story (2006) and The Kebble Collusion (2012). In the latter he claimed that Investec and KPMG covered up what he called the world's largest unprosecuted fraud, which he calculated by 2012 amounted to R26-billion. He claimed the two helped Kebble steal R1.9-billion in Randgold & Exploration shares and then actively covered up their involvement to frustrate potential lawsuits after Kebble's death in 2005. Sergeant wrote that Kebble used the cash to keep his business empire, particularly the gold-mining company JCI, afloat,...
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