Someone is lying, JSE says of Mantengu’s ‘conspiracy’

On the eve of a high-octane court clash over sensational claims by Mantengu that there is a widespread “conspiracy” to manipulate stock prices and tank companies, the JSE has accused the chrome miner’s CEO, Mike Miller, of misleading the public.

Tomorrow, the JSE will ask Joburg’s high court to grant an interdict stopping Miller from making these allegations which, if true, would shoot a rocket through the credibility of the local investment market. 

Last week, Miller revealed that his evidence is largely based on screenshots of emails, ostensibly between JSE directors Zarina Bassa and Ian Kirk, and financial commentator The Finance Ghost, discussing manipulating Mantengu’s shares.

On Friday, Andre Visser, the JSE’s director of issuer services, filed new court papers expressing his astonishment that this was the sum total of Miller’s evidence. “The screenshots are not credible evidence, are riddled with inconsistencies, and Mantengu and Miller have not been frank in explaining where the images come from,” he says.

In his affidavit, Miller says the screenshots “were delivered in an envelope to Mantengu’s office anonymously by an unknown man” sometime in September. 

Visser argues that instead of proving wrongdoing by the JSE’s directors or staff, the screenshots only “demonstrate that the allegations by Mantengu and Miller against the JSE have been made in the absence of credible evidence”.

A screenshot of one email supposedly from Bassa says the “account must look organic, not staged”, implying that this was a trading account being set up to manipulate shares. Another from “iwk432@gmail”, supposedly Kirk, urges Bassa to “please do something” since the stock is stabilising. 

Miller says this “demonstrates that at least one director and high-ranking employee of the JSE is, as a matter of fact, involved in the manipulation of Mantengu’s shares and possibly those of other companies”.

In its new court filing, the JSE includes a report from a forensic technology company called Blue Top Consulting, which says screenshots of emails are “easily manipulated”. The only way to determine the truth is to get hold of the original emails, Blue Top says. 

Either way, the stakes in this case are immense, with the credibility of South Africa’s capital market on the line. If, as Miller says, stocks are being widely manipulated by a “syndicate” that has thoroughly corrupted South Africa’s investment market, then anyone raising capital would want to steer clear of the JSE. 

“Until the JSE has cleaned house, think very, very carefully about [listing on the exchange],” Miller said in a paid-for article in Business Day newspaper. 

The JSE has now upped the ante, accusing Miller of lying to the public, his shareholders and the market by making statements that “are knowingly false”.

For a start, Visser says the dates don’t match up. He says Miller initially told the JSE that he obtained the “emails” on September 18, yet Mantengu’s forensic expert, Sarah-Jane Trent, said the screenshots were created on September 11, and she got them on September 16. 

“Someone, either Mantengu and Miller, or their expert, is not telling the truth.”

‘No metadata’

The new court papers filed on Friday also contain affidavits from Bassa, Kirk and the Finance Ghost denying that they ever sent any of these emails. 

This is significant, since last week Miller told Currency that while he “suspected” that Kirk and the Finance Ghost used the email addresses involved – iwk432@gmail.com and shadowghost@protonmail.com – “we have verified that this is Zarina Bassa’s email address”.

Bassa, in her affidavit, does admit this is her email address – but she denies she sent any of those emails. Her internet service provider Vox Telecom provided a report, now included in the court papers, which underpins her denial. 

“Based on all available evidence across systems, no trace, record, or metadata exists relating to any email from ‘iwk432@gmail.com’ to ‘zari@absamail.co.za’ [or] from ‘zari@absamail.co.za’ to ‘shadowghost@protonmail.com’,” Vox said.

When it comes to Kirk, Blue Top Consulting found that the gmail address actually belongs to another Ian Kirk in North America, who appears to be a senior buyer at Pennsylvania-based company USM,which supplies marketing services. 

Robert Peché, the chartered accountant behind the Finance Ghost, last week told Currency that he never had any such “shadowghost” email account, and that “the only conspiracy exists in Mike Miller’s head”.

Initially, Miller said the “metadata” of the emails had helped reveal the conspiracy, adding that the email addresses used were “highly encrypted”. 

But Visser questions this, saying “the hardcopy of the email will not have metadata”, and that there is no “chain of custody” that would allow Mantengu to “investigate the authenticity or legitimacy of the emails, let alone its metadata”.

Still, the JSE’s denials are predictable, Miller told Currency. 

The stock exchange has much to lose through the exposure of a “syndicate” made up of “possibly hundreds of people” working in shadowy corners to drive down stock prices to a point where they can take over companies and strip their assets, he said. 

“The reality is, my company is under attack, and I have to respond. We don’t think this is happening, we know this is happening,” he said.

The conspiracy, such as it is, will be ventilated in court on Tuesday.

_{Top image: Mantengu CEO Mike Miller. Picture: mantengu.com; Rawpixel/Currency collage.}