Yesterday afternoon at an office on Cape Town’s busy Long Street, Herman Pretorius shot and killed his former business partner Julian Williams. The two had been involved in some kind of dispute.

After shooting Williams in the neck and the stomach, Pretorius turned the gun on himself, shot himself in the head, and was declared dead on his arrival at hospital.

Moneyweb immediately picked up on the speculation about this incident being the result of prior sour business dealings. They’d reported the two had been involved in a dispute over what they describe as “a war of words [that] erupted over the failure of unlisted public company SA Superalloys to pay dividends on its preference shares.”

Williams was a director of Superalloys, Pretorius was not.

Williams was the chief executive of private-equity group Basileus Capital, and it was in the Basileus offices where the shootings occurred.

The two were allegedly holding an unscheduled meeting at the time.

Moneyweb has more:

Pretorius had sold preference shares in SA Superalloys to about 500 private investors.

SA Superalloys stopped paying dividends this year. Pretorius accused Williams of failing to answer his questions about how investors’ money had been spent. He suggested that Williams may have used some of the money to fund Basileus Capital.

Williams responded that Pretorius had put pressure on him to pay dividends when the company was not in a position to do so. He also said that Pretorius was trying to divert attention from his unregulated investment scheme, the Relative Value Arbitrage Fund.

Basileus Capital has about 50 employees. It is responsible for sourcing investments for JSE-listed preference share BK One. One of BK One’s investments is Avalloy, a subsidiary company of SA Superalloys.

Pretorius has a very loyal following among wealthy investors in small Western Cape towns such as Moorreesburg, Porterville, Hopefield, Malmesbury, Durbanville and Riversdale. His Relative Value Arbitrage Fund had reported excellent returns to investors but there is no known way of verifying if these returns are genuine. Pretorius is not registered with the FSB and the fund has no third party administrator.

Police spokesperson Warrant Officer November Filander:

The two were in a meeting in an office on the third floor of the Icon building in Lower Long Street. People in the building heard about three shots being fired.

Williams is no stranger to controversy and was last year removed from the board of directors of Wesizwe Platinum where he had been the longest-serving director, and the company’s founder. The move happened when “shareholders voted in favour of an R6 billion venture with a Chinese consortium to build a new platinum mine in SA, underlining China’s growing interest in the country’s resources sector and giving the Asian powerhouse its first direct exposure to a major platinum play in SA.”

That deal marked the first real entrance of the Chinese into South African platinum mining, and one large shareholder was quoted at the time as saying: “I’m not surprised. He doesn’t fit any more.”

In May this year, the costs of building that platinum mine had now doubled to R12 billion, the new Wesizwe CEO, Jianke Gao, told Mining Weekly.

A few hours ago, City Press assistant editor Adriaan Basson speculated on further spice surrounding the deaths of the two:

[Source: Moneyweb]