A rupture in the united front put up by the Dimension Data “six” has resoundingly thrown open one of the more alarming cases of corporate malfeasance in recent years.
With a criminal investigation of fraud by the Hawks apparently “at an advanced stage”, this is the last thing Didata founder Jeremy Ord and his colleagues still in the firing line would want, as it leaves them badly exposed.
More than that, if this case does proceed to a criminal trial, it would open up potentially awkward questions about how a group of white executives allegedly swung a R1.4bn “empowerment deal” past bankers and regulators without anyone noticing a thing.
“These are the kinds of revelations that show the entire private sector in a bad light,” says one former executive who knew Didata well after it listed on the JSE in 1987.
The disclosure also caps a nightmarish fall for Ord, the self-confident wunderkind who, along with Bruce Watson, built Didata from scratch in 1983 before selling it to the Japanese firm NTT in 2010 for R24bn, in what was then South Africa’s largest technology deal.
The facts are by now well known. In 2019, Didata struck an empowerment deal to sell its flagship property, the 75,000m² Campus, to a consortium of black women for R1.4bn. This was done, Didata said at the time, in “pursuit of a sustainable South Africa”, with the added benefit that the sale boosted the company’s BEE rating.
Then in May 2021, a whistleblower told NTT that actually, Didata’s own executives — Ord, Jason Goodall, Grant Bodley, Saki Missaikos, Steven Nathan and Watson — were the people who had “secretly” bought The Campus instead.
This was serious, not least because many of that group were also part of the Didata committee that negotiated the sale for the Japanese and hadn’t disclosed this conflict.
Until now, the Didata six have maintained they did nothing wrong, despite a ruling last year from high court judge Denise Fisher, who said they had “deliberately subverted” empowerment laws in designing “an illegal scheme designed to appropriate for themselves a secret financial benefit”.
Then last week, Goodall sensationally broke ranks.
In a signed statement to NTT, Goodall admitted he had “secretly” been part of the structure that bought The Campus, conceding that that was a “very serious breach of fiduciary duty”, which misled the Japanese firm.
“We continued successfully to hide our participation until it was discovered following a whistleblower report made in May 2021,” he said. “I apologise unreservedly to NTT and all its employees.”
This admission, as part of the “settlement” in arbitration hearings in London, also saw Goodall agree to pay R208.6m to NTT. It was, as one lawyer put it, a “bombshell”, with potentially devastating implications for Ord and those executives.
They evidently realised as much, because, within hours, four of them (excluding Watson, whose case is slightly different and who seems to have his lawyer) hit back.
“We have noted with shock and dismay the statement in which [Goodall] has seen fit to speak on our behalf in admitting wrongdoing,” they said. “This admission of wrongdoing is also entirely inconsistent with what [he] has deposed to under oath.”
Evidently, Goodall had come under huge pressure. Last Monday, he sent a WhatsApp message to the other Didata executives telling them he had settled with NTT. He told them he was “shattered”, and had settled the case after “a brutal weekend and a really tough time over the last six months preparing for the arbitration”.
Goodall apparently put his own legal fees in this case at R150m, but said that had he kept fighting NTT and lost, “I would have been totally wiped out”.
In their response, the other executives said that contrary to what Goodall admitted, the fund structure through which they’d invested in The Campus had been “specifically approved by NTT under advisement from various advisers”, including banks and lawyers.
And they said the timing of Goodall’s “admission” was “deeply inappropriate” because it comes as the Supreme Court of Appeal is finalising their judgment in the appeal of Fisher’s 2025 high court ruling.
Fierce denial
In that case, Ord and his fellow executives argued fiercely that they had misled nobody. In their court papers, they said that Identity Fund Managers (IFM) set up the entity that did in fact buy The Campus, and that the structure through which the white executives participated, Areti, was only IFM’s limited partner.
They argued that even after NTT supposedly found out about the involvement of the executives, it allowed the structure to stay intact to “maintain the beneficial” empowerment rating.
It’s quite a technical legal argument, but the heart of it is that NTT was well aware of what was going on and had sanctioned it.
“We only participated in the fund because The Campus was considered by us and NTT to be an integral and essential part of a management buyout transaction, which we were actively negotiating with NTT from 2019 to 2021,” they claim.
It remains to be seen whether the supreme court buys this argument.
Outside the court, however, Goodall’s admission is being interpreted as akin to rats fleeing a sinking ship.
“Why do these deals? When is enough enough?” asked veteran analyst David Shapiro, in a discussion with journalist Alec Hogg. Goodall, by contradicting what he had earlier said in the court case, “has perjured himself somewhere along the line”, Shapiro said.
The question is: with the criminal investigation still proceeding irrespective of any private deal struck with NTT in London, has Goodall’s admission now unwittingly opened the door for the Hawks to come knocking?
