22 Jan 2012 | LUCKY BIYASE
Marius Welthagen, the chief executive of the JSE-listed mining and exploration company Thabex, and his team of directors are up in arms over a R10-million investment they made in acquiring a 60% stake in Angel Diamonds, a Lesotho-based rough diamond business venture.
Problems within the operation have been compounded by the mysterious disappearance of 100000 rough diamonds worth about R556000 and an attempt by the company's minority shareholders in Lesotho to take over the project by liquidating it.
This week, in a move that could unleash a ferocious political row between Lesotho and South Africa and cast a shadow across mining investments in Lesotho, Welthagen and Thabex directors vowed to get to the bottom of the disappearance of the precious stones from under the noses of the Lesotho-based Angel Diamonds directors, Peter Masebo, a local businessman, and Cornelius Engelbrecht, a South African entrepreneur.
Thabex has already laid a formal complaint with the Kimberley Process secretariat, which seeks to keep "conflict" diamonds out of the market.
According to Welthagen, the diamonds were exported from an Angel Diamonds exploration project in Lesotho for sampling in Johannesburg in August 2009 and returned in March 2010, in the presence of Lesotho's minister of natural resources and the country's commissioner of mines and geology.
He said after several attempts to get the Lesotho government to intervene, he and the Thabex directors have written to President Jacob Zuma for advice.
Welthagen said Angel Diamonds applied for a mining lease for the project on December 12 2008. As a precondition, the company had to, among other things, remove ancestral graves from the soft portion of the mine's kimberlite and arrange for their reburial - which took place on August 22 2009.
He said that in January 2010, he and Thabex's accountant started to notice instances of corporate governance breaches, with unauthorised expenditure in the day-to- day management of Angel Diamonds.
He said several requests for documentary proof of expenditures were ignored by the two Angel Diamonds directors, Masebo and Engelbrecht, who were both based in Maseru.
Matters came to a head in June when the Thabex and Angel Diamonds directors were handed a court interdict that effectively stripped them of their majority shareholding and placed management control in the hands of Masebo and Engelbrecht.
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