His friends in Bangkok knew him as Ben Berger or Ben Smith, and didn’t pay much attention to what he did for a living – something in “finance”, he told them. He was rich, sure, but not super rich. His two teenage children went to an international school in the Thai capital; his second wife, Cattaliya Beevor, was a famous Thai model.
But towards the end of the last decade, the family’s lifestyle began to change. They bought an apartment in the St Regis, one of Bangkok’s most exclusive apartment blocks, where a three-bedroom flat goes for more than R70m. “Ben Berger” upgraded from a Ferrari to a bright orange McLaren supercar. One of his front companies acquired a 120-foot superyacht, the Wanderlust, spending R1.7bn to do so.
For one friend who knew him then, the extravagant spending did not compute. “He might have blended in as a ‘gray man’ if it weren’t for discrepancies and red flags that started adding up,” this friend told journalists. “Why were the kids called Mauerberger but he always went by ‘Ben Berger’ or ‘Ben Smith’? Why did he carry multiple burner phones?”
These details come from an extensive investigation by Project Brazen, an independent investigative journalism outlet. It concluded “Ben Berger” is actually Benjamin Mauerberger, a 47-year-old from Cape Town. The outlet alleges he is the mastermind of “a shadow empire of companies and properties valued at about $1.5bn [R26bn]” by laundering money for ruling elites in Cambodia and Thailand.
Going transcontinental
Mauerberger grew up in one of South Africa’s richest families. Morris Mauerberger, the family patriarch, was a self-made textile baron – he co-founded the Ackermans retail chain, among other successful businesses. Today, the family is primarily known for its philanthropic initiatives, which are run through the Mauerberger Foundation Fund.
In his early 20s, instead of going into the family business, he made his way to Bangkok. There, he allegedly discovered a unique talent for a certain type of con, as Project Brazen recounts: “The 2000 Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel movie Boiler Room captures this period: greedy young men cold-calling mom-and-pop investors to sell them worthless stocks, much like parts of the crypto ecosystem today. In Bangkok, they worked the phones from cheap office spaces, targeting investors in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, before heading to the city’s ‘girly bars’.”
Mauerberger allegedly started his own boiler room, which was raided by Thai police in 2001. He was later convicted of contempt in a New Zealand court for failing to appear in connection with a stock scam involving New Zealand investors.
A few years later, regulators in the UK shut down another alleged stock fraud scam connected to Mauerberger and his brother, Adam Mauerberger, who used to own the Mount Rozier vineyard in Somerset West.
For a while, Mauerberger kept under the radar. Then he met Yim Leak – the son of a prominent political figure in Cambodia, the southeast Asian country neighbouring Thailand. This is when he apparently evolved from small-town crook to multinational criminal mastermind.
In 2018, Mauerberger and Yim Leak allegedly concocted a money-laundering scheme in which parcels of prime Cambodian land were flipped to wealthy Chinese investors, often to develop casinos. The pair were reported to have taken a 20% cut, generating more than $1bn in revenue.
Mauerberger has also been accused of profiting from Cambodia’s notorious cyberscam compounds.
Scams and sanctions
These apparent scams were so lucrative they allegedly catapulted Mauerberger into the upper echelons of global organised crime – and gave him extraordinary influence at the very highest levels of southeast Asian politics.
Mauerberger has a Cambodian passport in the name of “Ben Smith”, and is listed as an “adviser” to the country’s Senate. He developed a close relationship with Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Thai prime minister who once owned Manchester City Football Club, helping him to purchase a private plane worth $60m. Mauerberger’s yacht was the venue for a diplomatic meeting in December last year between Shinawatra and the current prime minister of Malaysia.
Shinawatra is currently in a Thai prison, serving a one-year sentence for corruption.
Mauerberger’s sudden accumulation of extraordinary wealth, together with his ties to politically connected figures in both Cambodia and Thailand, have put him on the radar of authorities in the US.
They are worried about the geopolitical implications of Mauerberger’s activities, given his close connections with dodgy Chinese money. So worried, in fact, that in September the US Congress recommended sanctions be imposed on 44 individuals connected to “transnational criminal syndicates perpetuating mass online scam operations against Americans”.
Benjamin Mauerberger was the second name on the list.
If the South African Revenue Service wanted to ask Mauerberger a few questions, they would first need to find him. Mauerberger is reported to have left southeast Asia, perhaps for Dubai, and could not be located for comment.
His only response to the allegations by Project Brazen came from his Thai lawyer, who issued a statement in his name. “These are vile fabrications, entirely baseless, and unsupported by any evidence.” The lawyer added: “These accusations are false, unfounded, and deliberately misleading.”
This report was first published in ‘The Friday Paper’, a new national newspaper that is currently in its beta-testing phase. Sign up here to receive the next pilot edition.
Top image: Benjamin Mauerberger: Facebook; Rawpixel/Firefly/Currency collage.
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