Phil Edmonds has “a remarkable gift for enmity”, his biographer wrote when he was still a cricketer. So does Andrew Groves. Business partners who fell out with the duo found themselves the victims of spying and intimidation.

The duo had a problem that needed taking care of: a share dispute with another Sable Mining executive, Heine van Niekerk, had turned sour. There had been talks but he was not responding to their persuasion. On 23 February 2012, van Niekerk arrived at his Johannesburg office to find a man he had never seen before, Wayne Stoltz, announcing himself as Sable’s new head of security, with orders to escort him from the premises.

Albertus “Sailor” Van Schalkwyk, whose version of events comes from a sworn affidavit, is not someone you would like to meet alone on a dark night. Reportedly a veteran of apartheid South Africa’s Koevoet torture squad and once a mercenary in Iraq, he later did jail time for drug-smuggling in New Zealand. In 2011 he was with notorious Cape Town mobster Cyril Beeka on the morning he was shot. The following year he was working for new bosses: Phil Edmonds and Andrew Groves.

As Sailor van Schalkwyk approached the target, he realised normal surveillance tactics would not suffice. The high-walled property in Johannesburg’s affluent Inanda district was closely guarded. Beating a quick retreat to Rosebank a few minutes across town, he secured the services of a street prostitute. While she kept the guard busy, van Schalkwyk slipped quietly past to complete his reconnaissance.

Now Sable was on the verge of a deal to increase its holdings in van Niekerk’s firms. In January 2012, Edmonds summoned van Niekerk to a meeting at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he “attempted to coerce me into accepting a substantially reduced price” for his Delta shares, van Niekerk said in written testimony for a South African lawsuit. It was a shareholder dispute that should have been settled in court. But for Edmonds and Groves, it was personal.

Sable’s ties to van Niekerk went back to Liberia in 2010, when Edmonds and Groves had bought into his companies, Delta Mining and Southern Cross. Van Niekerk’s network in the country gave them access to top Liberian officials and he quickly became embroiled in Sable’s bribery. His contacts with South African intelligence chiefs helped Sable get close to Alpha Condé as he ran for the presidency in neighbouring Guinea.

Four days later, Stoltz emailed a photograph of van Niekerk to an intermediary, who forwarded it to Sailor van Schalkwyk, according to a court filing. The former mercenary filed it in a handwritten dossier headed “Target”.

For now, there was nothing for van Niekerk to do but go home. On Groves’ orders, Stoltz had removed the computer servers, effectively shutting down the office, and upstairs in the boardroom van Niekerk found a director firing the firm’s employees. Before leaving the building for the last time, van Niekerk made sure to grab the back-up servers, depositing them with the company’s lawyers for safekeeping.

“Be afraid,” Stoltz told him later in a text message, van Niekerk claimed in a court submission. “Be very afraid.” Stoltz told Global Witness in a telephone interview that he does not recall sending the message.

Like other enemies of Edmonds and Groves, van Niekerk would remember his first encounter with Stoltz. It was the start of an increasingly unpleasant relationship.

It wasn’t until a year later that the real contents of the emails emerged. On 14 February 2013 van Niekerk received a visit from the police, accompanied by Sable computer expert Michael Theron. Something seemed amiss with the warrant, which didn’t seem to have been filed by the officer leading the search. That didn’t stop the police from confiscating his computer.

But the attachment was suspiciously large—too large to open, in fact. Two hours later Linnow emailed again. “Hi Heine, It appears that the document is too big to be sent, here is a link to the document. Just click on it.”

Not long after the bugs appeared, the emails started. On 17 April, van Niekerk opened his inbox to find a message from Stoltz—apparently drafted by his personal assistant, Jacqueline Linnow (Stoltz’s wife, under her maiden name). The email contained an offer to step in and mediate with Groves. Attached was a draft letter suggesting a cash settlement.

“The first show day was used to do inspection of the property in order to establish the best positions of the devices, which functioned via a cellular transmission signal,” van Schalkwyk said later in his affidavit. “The 'bugs' were installed during the second show day, a week later. I provided Stoltz with the numbers of all the bugs, which enabled him to listen to van Niekerk's conversations.”

Roberts telephoned van Niekerk, who rushed home and searched the house. A similar box was attached to the underside of the bed in the master bedroom, he testified.

“Sitting at my desk in the study, I found a small, rectangular black device with wiring and two metal antennas,” Kristin Keely Roberts, a US attorney, said in a sworn statement.

It was on the afternoon of 26 March that van Niekerk’s wife stumbled across the strange little box.

Days later—with the help of the Rosebank prostitute—van Schalkwyk was staking out van Niekerk’s high-security home. His breakthrough came a couple of weeks later: van Niekerk had put his house up for sale and was holding an open viewing. All van Schalkwyk’s team had to do was pose as prospective buyers.

Talking to Global Witness, Stoltz said he attended the meeting with Groves at the InterContinental but didn’t recall bringing van Schalkwyk. Sakkie Morkel’s wife told Global Witness that he was in hospital and not available for interview. She confirmed that her husband and van Schalkwyk were old friends and that Morkel had been offered work by Stoltz, though she didn’t know if he accepted.

Van Schalkwyk had brought a friend to the meeting, Sakkie Morkel, a former agent at the Vlakplaas, the apartheid government’s paramilitary hit squad, named after the farm where it was based. “It was agreed that we would work with Stoltz, who will instruct us via Groves,” van Schalkwyk said. “Stoltz instructed us to keep surveillance on Heine van Niekerk at all times and report back to him.”

“Groves told us that he wanted to destroy Heine van Niekerk, as he had destroyed others,” van Schalkwyk testified. In a disciplinary inquiry brought by Sable against van Niekerk, and later in a telephone interview, Stoltz confirmed that he worked for Edmonds and Groves and that he had recruited van Schalkwyk.

At 7am on 23 February 2012, a day after evicting van Niekerk, Stoltz was at the Intercontinental Hotel at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo Airport for an early briefing. Andrew Groves had just arrived on the overnight flight from London. It was a chance for Stoltz to introduce the boss to Sable’s newest recruit, Sailor van Schalkwyk.

After Edmonds and Groves fell out with a business partner, bugs were found in his home. ©Global Witness

It took four days to get it back. Suspecting tampering, van Niekerk turned it over to forensic experts. On 4 March, Cyanre, a consultancy run by the former head of the South African Police Service’s computer crime unit, returned a report.

Buried inside Stoltz’s emails were hidden surveillance programs to record keystrokes, track websites visited, take screenshots, capture video from the webcam and steal passwords.

The author of the attachment that concealed the hacking files was “Wayne Stoltz” and it was last edited by Michael Theron, according to Cyanre’s report. The stealth software was configured to send the captured data to an email address in the name of ‘Wayne Stoltz’. One of the hacking emails was sent from the same address given to Global Witness by Stoltz in a 5 April 2016 interview.

“It’s totally out of the ordinary,” said Cyanré boss Danny Myburgh, whose firm helped police decrypt Oscar Pistorius’ telephone during the athlete’s 2014 trial for shooting his girlfriend. “We found details of a person’s name all programmed in the code.”

Global Witness asked Stoltz if he sent the hacking emails. “I doubt it is true, to the best of my knowledge,” he said. He denied any involvement in bugging van Niekerk’s house.

‘They want to finish you, brother’

Meanwhile, Stoltz and van Schalkwyk were reporting back to Groves at the Intercontinental, according to van Schalkwyk’s testimony.

“I showed him the initial visual recording which was made during the first show day,” van Schalkwyk said. “Groves appeared to be very pleased with the recording and bragged to a group of men from Guinea, in his presence, that this is what happens to people ‘who give me shit’.”

But the bugging wasn’t enough, van Schalkwyk said. “At a later stage, Stoltz requested me to get rid of van Niekerk.”

When Global Witness contacted van Schalkwyk, he declined to say exactly what that meant. And he never carried out the orders: he argued with Stoltz and instead of “getting rid” of his target, he called van Niekerk to tell him about the plot. Global Witness has seen a transcript of the conversation.

“Heine, let me tell you, they want to fucking finish you, brother,” van Schalkwyk says.

Both Sable and van Niekerk filed criminal charges against each other in South Africa—Sable for theft of its data; van Niekerk for conspiracy to commit murder. In both cases, authorities declined to prosecute.

Van Niekerk, who did not respond to Global Witness’s requests for comment, based his case partly on van Schalkwyk’s testimony. Stoltz says the state prosecutor saw the ex-mercenary as a questionable witness. He was certainly a questionable person for Sable to hire.

Men in dark glasses

Global Witness has interviewed others who fell out with Edmonds and Groves—and whose experiences were remarkably similar to van Niekerk’s. One agreed to meet only in the presence of armed security, only to cancel half an hour before the appointment . Four people said they feared for their lives.

That was how Ana Solanki felt in July 2010 when armed men ransacked her house.

It had all started that spring, when her husband, African Medical Investments chief executive Vivek Solanki, decided to query some odd-looking payments.

The business was flourishing. Clinics were up and running in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Tanzania and a new one was about to open in Mozambique (where Solanki was already mixed up in Edmonds and Groves’ corrupt property—see Chapter Five: The Heist). The Johannesburg and Harare branches had taken $645,000 in profit that year.

That changed when without warning African Medical was hit by a 96 per cent “management fee”—payable to a London firm run by Edmonds and Groves. The pair had agreed to buy the two clinics at a price based on their profits. Now the extra charges had all but wiped out their income: for two hospitals together, Edmonds and Groves were offering just $28,000.

“This is going to look ridiculous!!” wrote Solanki to the duo and their lawyer, Philip Enoch, on 21 April 2010. “The legal cost will be more than the fucking transaction.”

Soon after, Ana noticed she was being followed. When she left the house to take her 10-year-old daughter to school, white men in dark glasses would be waiting in a car outside, she said in an interview with Global Witness.

“I thought maybe I was becoming paranoid so I would change and go on some very funny routes and then they were still following me,” she said. “It was very obvious.”

It was all too much for Vivek Solanki and in July 2010 he quit African Medical after an anonymous caller told him he would “end up in a box” and that his family would be “raped by Angolans”, according to his resignation letter.

‘Armed invasion’

Days later, on 16 July, Ana and her sister were alone in the family’s Johannesburg home when eight armed policemen arrived without a warrant, pointed guns at her and ransacked the house. Like the police who seized van Niekerk’s computer, they were accompanied by employees of Edmonds and Groves: two men she recognised from African Medical Investments.

When the police failed to find what they were looking for, they shouted at her in Afrikaans, a language she doesn’t speak. One officer vented his frustration by kicking a gym ball into the swimming pool, she said in a signed affidavit seen by Global Witness.

“I was very frightened,” she said. “I started shivering and feeling weak from the shock of the armed invasion.”

By the time they left after three fruitless hours, the policemen and African Medical men were laughing together and slapping each other on the back.

A month later, a warrant for Vivek Solanki’s arrest was issued in South Africa (it was later cancelled) and African Medical commissioned reports by accountants Deloitte and PwC. A draft copy of PwC’s report seen by Global Witness says that Solanki creamed off hundreds of thousands of dollars from African Medical’s Zimbabwe business—allegations he denies.

‘Horror-scope’

Fearing for his life, Solanki left South Africa in August to hide out with Ana’s family in Serbia for ten months, later beginning a court battle to try to win back African Medical. Meanwhile, the threats continued:

“Your horror-scope for today is ‘sleep with one eye open’,” said one late-night text message from a Zimbabwean number the Solankis didn’t recognise, Ana told Global Witness.

Then Wayne Stoltz—the man who hired Sailor van Schalkwyk and sent the hacking emails to van Niekerk—started leaving messages on Ana’s Facebook page: “Yo Doc Solanki, your time in the cells are coming.” (Stoltz’s own Facebook timeline contains a catalogue of sexist jokes. He likes John Grisham novels and Hannibal Lecter.)

Ana complained to the police. In 2013 she received a reply. “We’ve got Wayne Stoltz, you have to come and identify him,” said an email from an officer at Kempton Park police station in Johannesburg, she recalls. Her husband flew in from Zimbabwe. Arriving at the station around 4pm, the Solankis were shown into an office and told to wait.

After some time, a door opened and Stoltz appeared. Instead of being given the chance to identify him, the Solankis themselves were locked up. They spent the night in the cells and were released the next morning.

“I drew him back to the country on the auspices of laying charges,” Stoltz told Global Witness, saying Groves hired him to investigate Solanki. “I didn’t let anyone know that we had a warrant of arrest for him.”

In a letter to Global Witness, Edmonds and Groves didn’t respond to allegations of hacking and bugging. Edmonds would “never countenance” intimidation, they said. They didn’t comment on Sable’s relationship with Stoltz or van Schalkwyk. It wouldn’t be appropriate to give weight to testimony from “disaffected parties, including any allegations of intimidation, as they clearly have questionable motives”, they said.

Heine van Niekerk eventually put his confrontation with Edmonds and Groves behind him, winning a case for wrongful dismissal and striking a deal with Sable to buy Delta Mining back.

For Ana Solanki, six years after the fight over African Medical began, the fear remains.

“I’m waiting for somebody to attack me,” she said. “I believe somebody will try to kill me and Vivek. I deeply believe in that.”