Special Hearings — Chemical And Biological Warfare Hearings — 1998-06-08

DR VAN RENSBURG: Absolutely.  If you let the side down you're dead, right.  So what do you do, you try and leave quietly and hope they don't kill you which is probably possible.
 What happens then if someone else carries on and does much worse than you do?  I rationalised, if I stayed there I could minimise a lot of their effort and I'm very proud of what I did.  What I did ultimately got me fired, after being confronted by Wouter Basson about my liberal views, my alleged lifetime support to the DP.  How he found out I don't know, it was quite right.  It was pretty chilling to know you're, suddenly you're a target.    That was the one aspect that got me kicked out.  
 The other aspect which is probably more important, was the incredible waste of money that occurred at this place and the scams that these guys were trying to work out all the time, the high living, the absolute abuse of taxpayers money.  I had to continually, I was the most senior experienced civil servant there, I just felt it my duty to try to get these guys into line and to moderate the waste and also to counter what I considered were potential possible scams involving very large amounts of money.

MR CHASKALSON: Was the scams that you're talking about related only towards financial scams or would you say that there was also an academic or rather a scientific sham?

DR VAN RENSBURG: Purely financial scams.  The scams were mainly engineered by the ex-military personnel and they of course were not involved in the academic side at all.

MR CHASKALSON: We have heard testimony about lavish lifestyles, were you aware of such lifestyles?

DR VAN RENSBURG: Absolutely, it was disgraceful, the waste of taxpayers money.

MR CHASKALSON: Could you give us some sort of example as to what you're talking about in terms of a waste of money and possibly if it's in your scope, as to what sort of amounts we're talking about?

DR VAN RENSBURG: There would be small things like the habits of the Directors taking each other out to the very best restaurants in Pretoria or Johannesburg and at one stage they started a habit of thinking it a good idea that us four Directors eat out regularly.  I went to one and the next one I didn't turn up and I fell into severe disfavour.
 From small things like that to redecorating a brand new Director's office, ripping out all the panelling and sticking on pink wallpaper, ripping out imbuia door jams and replacing it with oak because that's what the guy just prefers to have.  Spending huge amounts on interior decorating, paintings by well-known artists.  Totally threatening the cover of the whole company because no commercial company of our type would waste money on trivialities like that.
 Other things like motor cars.  The Managing Director would not set an example for the young people.  It gave me a tremendous problem, to discipline the younger staff to look after their cars correctly when the Managing Director goes out of his way to wreck the motor cars, driving too fast.  
 There was a pool kombi, a Caravelle which he went down to the Wild Coast for some "bosberaad" with the Army people I believe, I'm not sure, then he boasts he drove all the way back and kept the rev counter in the red and the next day the engine has got to be replaced.  R8 000 but why worry, the taxpayer pays.  This sort of cavalier attitude.  That was a waste of money on the one side.  
 On the other side was, maybe I was unduly suspicious but I just suspected scams for, particularly in connection with private companies.  These military officers were obsessed with forming companies.  I was very much against this because every time they would come up with schemes like purchasing all our requirements through their company.  Who gets the cut-off, who knows?
 Selling all our contracts.  Marketing all our commercial work through one of these special officers companies.  Of course they get a rake off.  At one stage Basson, Wynand Swanepoel and a Chinaman by the name of Chu, he was a Swiss national because he'd married a Swiss girl, they had a meeting in Switzerland and they formed a company called Medchem Actein Geselschaft or something, Medchem Research Company.  They came with multi million possible contracts that our company had to sign with this company.  It was for predictably useless services, now who is getting that money, who is getting a cut, who owns what?
 The grandest scam of all that I suspected and that worried me the most was the facts, and this might not be a scam, I must emphasise it was my interpretation, the moment there were whisperings about privatisation of the front companies, the first thing they did was they went around and kicked out all the civilian Managing Directors in a vicious inhuman manner particularly in the case of Doctor Daan Goosen who is doing very well.
 They stuck ex-military officers, all from the special forces, all big buddies, took over all the front companies, in so doing handicapping the company immensely.  The threat I saw was that these people had no intention whatever of developing a viable permanent company.  They wanted to get in, grab the whole lot, liquidate it, grab their millions and push off.  And that's exactly what they did.  I predicted that years and years before it happened.

MR CHASKALSON: I'd like to stop you there and just tack a couple of questions on there.  I presume by "military buddies", in this particular case you are talking about Doctor Swanepoel taking over as the Managing Director of the company.

DR VAN RENSBURG: Yes, and Doctor Mijburgh, can we, of Delta G, that it happened about the same time.

MR CHASKALSON: I'd like to just stay wit RRL as you were working there at the time.

DR VAN RENSBURG: Right.

MR CHASKALSON: From the time that Doctor Swanepoel took over the company, I'd like to ask three questions.  First question, would you say that the quality of the science increased, got better or decreased from the time that he joined?

DR VAN RENSBURG: Doctor Swanepoel spent as much money as he could expanding the institute, the facilities.  What happened was, there was an enormous growth in the service units and not much growth, not anywhere near proportional growth in the research units.
 We had a huge administration, an enormous staff office, enormous security section, big finance section, hopelessly too big for any commercial viability in the long term and this is where we differed a lot.
 Your question on the quality of the science, I don't think that there was any difference.  We that were responsible for doing this science maintained our standards, with time we improved them.  I visited many contract research companies overseas.  We had potentially a lot of sub-contracting work coming our way when sanctions were eventually lifted.  I negotiated all this.  And we learnt, and I went to courses, quality assurance and so on, so our science did improve but it certainly didn't have anything to do with Doctor Wynand Swanepoel.

MR CHASKALSON: Maybe I should ask the question in a slightly different way.  While Doctor Goosen was a Managing Director, was he involved in scientific discussions and did he contribute in the scientific process?

DR VAN RENSBURG: Very much so, he was intimately involved and knew exactly what was going on.  He made good suggestions.  He worked out a lot of the logistics of the laboratories on his own computers.  He was very involved in the laboratory programmes and administration.

MR CHASKALSON: Did Doctor Swanepoel make a similar contribution?

DR VAN RENSBURG: No.  Doctor Swanepoel I don't think had a very good perception of what was going on in the laboratories.  Our Marketing Manager often wished that he could take Doctor Swanepoel on a tour of the Institute like he took our clients, so that he could get to know what was going on.  He had expressed this wish to me twice.