The Dimension Data Campus “Six” have become five after former Dimension Data chief executive Jason Goodall acknowledged responsibility for his role in the controversial R1.4bn sale of the company’s Bryanston headquarters, agreeing to pay Japanese parent NTT a whopping $12.5m settlement.
The payment, worth about R209m, is accompanied by something potentially more damaging to Goodall’s former colleagues: a remarkably direct admission that he and four of them secretly participated on the buyer’s side of the transaction while occupying senior positions on the seller’s side.
In a signed statement released on Wednesday, Goodall says he participated in the acquisition together with Dimension Data co-founder Jeremy Ord, Steven Nathan, Saki Missaikos and Grant Bodley, that their interests were held through nominees specifically to keep their names hidden, and that they failed to disclose those interests to NTT.
“We continued successfully to hide our participation until it was discovered following a whistleblower report made in May 2021,” Goodall says.
It’s difficult to imagine a sentence more inconvenient for the remaining defendants.
Illegal scheme
The Campus case has become one of the most extraordinary corporate-governance battles in recent South African business history. In 2019, Dimension Data sold its landmark Bryanston Campus to Identity Property Fund for R1.4bn in a transaction presented as strengthening the company’s black ownership credentials.
NTT later alleged that the transaction had another layer: senior Dimension Data executives themselves held undisclosed economic interests in the purchasing structure.
In November 2024 Johannesburg High Court Judge Denise Fisher accepted the essence of NTT’s case, finding that Ord, Bruce Watson, Goodall, Bodley, Missaikos and Nathan had participated in what she described as an “illegal scheme designed to appropriate for themselves a secret financial benefit”. The transaction, she found, was “clandestine” and “brazen and dishonest”.
The executives appealed. Their case was that Fisher had gone too far in deciding heavily disputed facts on affidavit without hearing oral evidence, and that NTT knew considerably more about the possibility of management participation than it subsequently admitted.
Goodall’s statement now cuts directly across an important part of that defence.
Failed to disclose interests
He says the participants knew they were obliged to disclose their interests to NTT and failed to do so. He also dismisses the proposed management buyout as an explanation, saying it was understood to be a separate transaction.
That does not amount to a confession on behalf of the other executives; Ord, Bodley, Missaikos and Nathan can dispute his account, challenge his motives for giving it and argue that their individual knowledge and obligations differed. But the litigation has plainly changed shape.
Until now NTT’s case depended largely on documents, corporate structures and the inferences drawn from them. Goodall potentially gives it something much more useful: an insider able to explain what the participants were doing and why.
That distinction could matter particularly because the litigation is not solely civil.
NTT and Dimension Data have also laid criminal complaints arising from the transaction. Public reporting has indicated that law-enforcement authorities have investigated the matter, although there is no public indication that Ord or the other remaining executives have yet been formally charged.
Goodall’s statement could nevertheless be important to any criminal investigation because it addresses one of the more difficult elements in a fraud case: intention.
Opaque ownership structures and undeclared conflicts can be explained away as mistakes, misunderstandings or failures of corporate process. Goodall’s account is rather harder edged. He says the structures were designed to keep the executives’ names hidden and that they knowingly failed to make disclosures they were obliged to make.
Whether he has also agreed to cooperate with investigators is not known. His legal representatives have declined to comment beyond issuing his statement.
NTT cannot grant Goodall immunity from criminal prosecution, but the combination of a large payment and an unusually expansive admission raises the obvious question of whether his agreement extends beyond writing a cheque.
The size of that cheque is striking in its own right.
The $12.5 million appears not to correspond simply to Goodall’s possible gain on the Campus property. The settlement amount is far larger than any readily identifiable share of the apparent discount embedded in the property transaction.
Wider financial exposure
Instead it appears more likely to reflect Goodall’s much wider financial exposure to NTT.
NTT had separately sued Goodall in Britain in litigation connected with his employment and termination arrangements. English court papers show the dispute included multimillion-dollar claims arising from his departure from the group, in addition to claims connected with the Campus transaction. Goodall had become global CEO of NTT Ltd after previously running Dimension Data.The $12.5m therefore looks less like disgorgement of a property profit and more like the negotiated price of making a sprawling dispute disappear.
For the five remaining members of the original Campus Six, however, the problem has not disappeared at all.
Goodall specifically names Ord, Nathan, Missaikos and Bodley in his statement. Watson is notably absent from that passage, although the High Court found that he too ultimately became an investor and beneficial owner in the transaction. The distinction may become important as the litigation proceeds.
The appeal was enrolled in the Supreme Court of Appeal in May this year, with all six executives originally listed as appellants. Goodall’s settlement now means the legal and factual alignment that once bound them together has fractured.
For Ord and the others, the awkwardness is obvious. Their defence no longer merely has to overcome NTT’s interpretation of emails and corporate structures. It may have to overcome the testimony of a former colleague who says the concealment was deliberate.
The Campus Six began as a group of former Dimension Data heavyweights jointly resisting one of the harshest corporate judgments handed down in South Africa in years. They are now five men defending themselves while the sixth has paid R209m and said, in substance, that the central allegation was true.
For NTT, that may prove considerably more valuable than the money.
