Former lottery board member’s abandoned business got R4.6m in funds

A non-profit company controlled by former National Lotteries Committee (NLC) board member William Huma received a R4.6m lottery grant for a hydroponic vegetable farming project to create jobs and supply produce to residents of a poor North West community.

But two-and-a-half years later, the project in the Lekgalong area in North West has been abandoned and there is little indication of how the millions of rand the Lottery gave to Reagile, a non-profit company, were spent.

The grant was allocated to Reagile on August 19 2021, not long before Huma resigned from the NLC’s board after he was confronted with details of how he had profited from corrupt lottery grants.

Inexplicably, taking into account the purpose of the grant, the funding was awarded under the NLC’s Arts, Culture and National Heritage sector.

Reagile’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) registration as a business states that the company’s principal business is to “conduct farming and agricultural projects in rural communities, capacitate, train and employ women and youth from rural communities”.

The grant of R4,658,118 is now under investigation by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU).

Reagile was originally set up in 2017 by a company that sets up and sells shelf companies. A shelf company is a company that is already registered but has never traded or conducted business and holds no assets or liabilities and “sits on a shelf” waiting for someone to buy it.

Reagile was bought off-the-shelf on March 6 2020. New directors, including Huma’s then-girlfriend Lorato Moyo, who he has since married, and other members of his family and a close friend, were installed as directors just five months before the NLC approved Reagile’s grant. The original directors who had set up and sold the company, resigned on the same day as the new directors were appointed.

Neither Huma nor Moya responded to detailed questions sent to them via Huma’s email address.

Abandoned

Huma told people the project was a “pilot” that would grow tomatoes, a source with direct knowledge of the project told GroundUp. It was meant to create jobs for locals and provide affordable, fresh vegetables for the nearby communities, which never happened.

“It never really got off the ground and has been abandoned,” the source said. “It never employed anyone and never sold much produce, if anything at all.”

A Google Earth satellite photo taken on April 27 2023, shows that several of the vegetable-growing tunnels are badly damaged after apparently being left to the elements when the project was abandoned. A February 2021 satellite photo shows a single small building on the property. But a few months later a new photo, dated October 14 2021, shows that 10 grow tunnels had been installed on the property. Six months later, on April 14 2022, damage to the front of one of the tunnels was visible. A year later, serious damage to half of the tunnels is clearly visible.

The size of the tunnels is unknown, but according to a quote GroundUp obtained from a credible supplier, grow tunnel prices range from R7,500 for a “B Grade” 3m x 6m tunnel, to R68,500 for a top-of-the-range 12m x 30m tunnel. Prices exclude plastic covering, VAT, delivery and construction. Even with the most expensive tunnels, add-ons and VAT, the total cost of the 10 tunnels is nowhere near the more than R4.6m grant Reagile received.

A source with knowledge of the project told GroundUp: “Huma and Ms Moyo [now Huma] controlled the finances, and everything else. Most of the directors were unemployed and desperate for work and this was the big break they were hoping for. But they were kept in the dark about the project. He has left them high and dry. This thing has just made them miserable and left them depressed. And now the SIU is also asking them questions about the grant and how they were involved.”

Dodgy financials

To qualify for funding, Reagile would have had to supply two years of financial statements in terms of the Lotteries Act when it applied to the NLC for funding. But because Reagile was a shelf company it would not have previously traded and therefore could not have met the two-year financial statements requirement.

GroundUp has seen an unsigned set of financials for Reagile dated February 28 2019, which suggest that the company was financially active. Yet, the new directors were only appointed on March 6 2020, after the end of the 2019 financial year.

During the course of our investigations into Lottery corruption, we have come across several instances where fake financials were submitted to the NLC, like this one used by Life for Impact in the 21st Century with its application for funding a youth awards ceremony.

Living large on Lotto

The vegetable project is not the only instance in which Huma has profited from a Lottery grant.

The project is a 20-minute drive along sand roads from a Lottery-funded poultry farm, on a smallholding owned by Silverlite Trading, a private company, of which Huma is the sole director. The poultry farm was frozen earlier in 2023 after an application to the Special Tribunal by the Assets Forfeiture Unit (AFU) for a preservation order. It was never profitable and stopped trading in 2022. It has also been regularly targeted by thieves, and security officers at the property have come under attack.

The poultry farming project was funded by a R13m Lottery grant to nonprofit company The Samaritan Initiative, intended to uplift women in Marikana, the site of a massacre of striking miners in 2012.

The Samaritan Initiative was registered with the department of social development in March 2016. It was both dormant and non-compliant, according to CIPC records, at the time the NLC approved the grant. It also has no internet presence. None of the registered directors were involved in the poultry farm, and the non-profit organisation (NPO) bears all the hallmarks of having been hijacked. Also, based on improvements on the property, it is unlikely that the entire R13m was spent there.

The NPO had never submitted financial and other statutory reports to department of social development, raising questions about the extent of the NLC’s due diligence before awarding the grant.

GroundUp previously reported how, within a week of the NLC approving a R20m grant in 2017 to Matieni Community Centre to build an old-aged home in the rural village of Marapyane, R5m of the grant was paid to attorneys handling the sale of a luxury estate in Rustenburg.

The payment to the lawyers by Matieni was for the purchase of a luxury Rustenburg property to BDH Group (Pty) Limited, of which William Huma was the sole director. The property, which was later converted into a luxury boutique hotel, has also been frozen by the Special Tribunal.

GroundUp has also shown how money from grants was paid into the bond account for Huma’s luxury home in Pretoria. The investigation also showed how two separate payments of R1m each were paid to Huma in late 2016 by Upbrand Properties, just months before he was appointed to the NLC’s board on April 1 2017. Upbrand is linked to the former COO of the NLC, Phillemon Letwaba, who resigned in 2022 while facing a disciplinary inquiry.

Huma said at the time that both payments were instalments on the purchase of Just Cuban, an upmarket restaurant and music venue in Pretoria, by Daisy Letwaba, one Letwaba’s two wives.

GroundUp