What seems 100 years ago to me - but was in fact only about 15 - I wrote a book with and about a man called Bob Aldworth, who in those days was a well-known, maybe even notorious, character in South African business circles.

I say "in those days" because three months ago, at the beginning of May 2009, when Bob died, I was mired in the traffic somewhere in the dark wilds of the north of Johannesburg, when I heard Radio 702's Bruce Whitfield announce that Aldworth had died.

But Whitfield didn't seem to know a helluva lot about Aldworth. He focused mainly on Aldworth's notorious "affair" with Sandra van der Merwe and seemed to have gleaned most of his information from the obituary written by Chris Barron in the Sunday Times.

Like most Barron obituaries, it was very good. Yet it was hardly the kindest of farewells. This was not surprising. It was (and is) easy to make fun of Aldworth.

There was, as I have mentioned, the affair with Van der Merwe - "[s]he was 37 and a blonde bombshell of note [and] Aldworth was 51", as Barron put it; and Aldworth was found in 1993 to have "stolen" (Barron's word - Aldworth explained it differently) R414 000 from Absa bank, his employer.

The main thing about Aldworth was that he was a textbook example of the Icarus Syndrome: a golden boy ("youngest banking chief executive in the country when he was made boss of Barclays Bank in South Africa at the age of 44 in 1976") who had flown too close to the sun and as a result had been badly burnt and drowned.

And we lesser mortals (or many of us) love to see someone taking the big fall. We secretly rejoice when the Greek goddess Nemesis zaps someone because we are envious that we, who are surely cleverer, more competent and better looking, never had a chance to do the high-flying.

At any rate, Barron ended his obituary as follows: "Aldworth wrote a book, The Infernal Tower, in which he blamed his fall on just about everyone but himself."

To the book then: The Infernal Tower: the damage to people, careers and reputations in corporate South Africa by Bob Aldworth as told to Jeremy Gordin and Benjamin Trisk, published by Contra Press, Johannesburg, in 1996, and now "very OP" (out-of-print), as they say.

Two points about the book.

Aldworth, a pretty traumatised individual as much as a result of illness as anything else, didn't blame his fall on everyone but himself. He merely tried to tell the story of what had happened to him as best he could, or as best as Trisk and I could.

Point two. The book, which had begun "merely" as Aldworth's story, ended up going far beyond Aldworth and his travails.

It also told the stories of Julian Askin, a business wunderkind and owner of the giant Tollgate company; Kevin de Villiers, ex-group MD of Allied; and Hennie Diedericks, a former postmaster general (do we still have those?), ex-MD of Trust and Volkskas banks, and ex-CEO of Tollgate.

And of course it told the "story" of Absa and many of its senior executives because they were the enemy as far as Aldworth, De Villiers, Askin and Diedericks were concerned. The Infernal Tower (the co-authors' little joke based on the movie title, The Towering Inferno) was Absa Towers in downtown Johannesburg.

Above all, the book opened up the proverbial can of worms known as the "Reserve Bank lifeboat" - a huge amount of money given by the SA Reserve Bank to Bankorp, which became part of Absa. The SARB was not legally allowed to hand over money to private banks - and everyone, including Chris Stals, then governor of the Reserve Bank, kept lying about the issue.

It was actually a gift, a present from the boeties to the boeties, not a "lifeboat" at all.  

The Aldworth book went there because Aldworth et al were in one way or another involved with, or victims of, the lifeboat shenanigans. It was a huge scandal in the 1990s.

But readers need not take my word for it. Here is Hennie van Vuuren, of the Cape Town branch of the Institute of Security Studies, in his 2006 report, "Apartheid Grand Corruption: Assessing the Scale of Crimes of profit in South Africa from 1976 to 1994."

"Bankorp was bought by Absa (Amalgamated Banks of South Africa), today Africa's biggest commercial bank, which was formed out of the amalgamation of United Bank and Volkskas in 1990 and eventually a further acquisition of three (further) banks in 1992," the report states.

"... However, Bankorp was in financial trouble... and in 1985 the Reserve Bank provided it with a 'lifeboat' of about R300-million to prevent it from capsizing.

"To further assist Bankorp, in mid-1990 the Reserve Bank made a loan of R1,5-billion available at an interest rate of 1% a year - extremely favourable terms not available to any individual (or probably commercial lender) in South Africa at the time or since.

"Former Absa banker Bob Aldworth, in his exposé on the deal (The Infernal Tower), writes that R1,1-billion was invested in government stock and R400-million was put on deposit with the Reserve Bank and both earned interest of 16 percent a year.

"When ... Governor Stals was confronted with evidence of this secret deal, his response was that it was in the interest of the economy to keep it secret ... he had done it to protect the country's banking system and that it wasn't really taxpayers' money, as it had all been created with a specific purpose and it was a loan to boot.

"A number of commentators responded that it was no loan - but was clearly a gift by the Reserve Bank to a private institution which benefited that institution's shareholders. A large bank was given unfair advantage by the state [over] its competitors. Secondly, no tax had been required for the gift to Bankorp/Absa, suggesting that the loss in tax revenue may have been as large as the gift itself."

Now, Diedericks, having been chief executive of Tollgate, a Cape-based conglomerate trading in hosiery, textiles, food and transport and having been a top executive in the lion's den, was one of the most important voices in the whole saga.

A great deal had happened to Diedericks since 1993 when Aldworth had been defrocked. He had taken an overdose of sleeping pills in a Gordon's Bay hotel. He survived only because the staff contacted his wife.

Chief executive of the post office by then, he had fallen apart emotionally after being fingered as the chief villain in the demise of Tollgate, which was then owned by entrepreneur Julian Askin. The liquidators of Tollgate alleged that Diedericks had stolen R18,9-million from the company (he hadn't) and the office for Serious Economic Offences - the Scorpions, or Hawks, of yore - searched his home. Not only that, but Volkskas, then part of Absa, and a bank of which he had been chief executive, had frozen all his accounts.

Diedericks contacted Danie Cronje, Absa's chief executive at the time, a friend and former Broederbond and banking colleague. But Cronje, who became chairman of Absa, said he could do nothing for Diedericks.

However, by 1997, Diedericks had pulled himself together and had come back fighting, legally. Diedericks discovered that he had been the fall guy at Tollgate for a number of issues, all of which led back, one way or another, to the lifeboat. Diedericks' story was taken up by investigative journalist Paul Bell in Millennium Magazine and then in the Aldworth book.

So, in 1997, Diedericks was very excited to "score" a meeting in Cape Town with one Gill Marcus, the newly-appointed deputy minister of finance in a new and democratic government.

Marcus, soon to turn 60, returned to South Africa in 1990 as one of the ANC's chief spokespeople, then became known as an efficient chairman of parliament's joint finance committee, and in June 1996 was appointed deputy minister of finance.

By then it was an open secret that the Reserve Bank had been cheating on behalf of Bankorp and Absa. And Diedericks was looking forward to telling Marcus exactly where all "the bodies were buried".

But he returned from the meeting with Marcus feeling deeply disconsolate.

"She just wasn't very interested," Diedericks said at the time. "Actually she was pretty dismissive."

In 2002, a panel of experts, appointed by SARB Governor Tito Mboweni, and headed by Judge Dennis Davis, found that the Reserve Bank had indeed "exceeded its authority", but that Stals had not intentionally broken the law and that Absa had not been a major beneficiary of the lifeboat.

I am not given to criticising judges (lest I end up in front of them), and certainly not Judge Davis. But to some of us who had been close to the story, it felt as though some people and institutions got off pretty lightly.

At any rate, in 2007 Marcus became the country's first woman chairman of a bank, chairman of Absa, by then South Africa's largest retail bank, and owned by Barclays, the English banking giant. In between, from July 1999 -2004, she had been deputy governor of SARB.

Now, as of November this year, Marcus will be governor of the Reserve Bank.

And, according to Chris Blaine of Moneyweb, Marcus won't have to trim her expenditure in service to the country. He wrote that "the difference between what Gill Marcus currently earns, excluding share options, and what current Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni earns is only R91 000".

Current RB governor, Tito Titus Mboweni, receives a total package of R3,401-million per year, according to the Reserve Bank Annual Report 2007/08. This includes dividends on the 10 000 RB shares. Marcus currently earns R3,492-million excluding share options from Absa, Gold Fields, and the Independent Board for the Regulation of Auditors.

Am I trying to impute something? Do I think Marcus' dismissal of Diedericks in 1997 was male fides?

I do not. I think the lifeboat issue was not something she wanted to deal with in 1997. Perhaps she even knew that in good time the matter would go to a panel of experts, as it did. Perhaps she was even instrumental in ensuring it went there.

Do I think she did anything wrong by accepting the chairmanship of Absa in 2007?

No, I don't. It was under new management and Danie Cronje was leaving - to make place for her.

It is interesting, nonetheless, that, as Moneyweb's Felicity Duncan has pointed out, "[w]ith the appointment of Marcus as new RB governor, the revolving door between Absa and government seems to be spinning ever-more rapidly.

"In leaving Absa, however, Marcus is not cutting the ties between the red bank and the green and gold party. In November last year, Absa announced that former state-owned-enterprise Transnet boss Maria Ramos would be replacing Steve Booysen as CEO. Ramos has been in the executive suite for several months.

"Even more interestingly, Absa Capital deputy Chairman Leslie Maasdorp has been tipped to be the next boss at Transnet, replacing Ramos. 

"It all puts one in mind of the situation of Goldman Sachs in the USA. In an extensive report in October last year, the New York Times laid out the web of connections binding the investment bank to government. So extensive were the links that Goldman has earned itself the nickname ‘Government' Sachs."

But so it goes. If it's not surprising that President Jacob Zuma would appoint people who were active with him during the Struggle, why shouldn't Marcus assist people with whom she works?

So is there any moral, hidden or otherwise, to this tale of Aldworth, Diedericks, the lifeboat, and Marcus?

Not especially - just a moment's silence, perhaps, for the way in which one of South Africa's strangest banking sagas has played out.

Askin, the last time I spoke to him, would not return to South Africa lest he be arrested. Aldworth is in the ground. Diedericks has disappeared. (Despite my best efforts, I have been unable to find him.) Absa is apparently "SA's Goldman Sachs". And Marcus is the new governor of the Reserve Bank.

So it goes, as the late Kurt Vonnegut used to write.

* Jeremy Gordin is a veteran journalist ("so veteran," say his detractors, "that he's verging on senility"). He was a co-author of Bob Aldworth's The Infernal Tower: The damage done to people, careers and reputations in corporate South Africa, 1996; and Eugene de Kock's A Long Night's Damage: Working for the Apartheid State, 1998. Last year he wrote Zuma: A Biography, short-listed on July 17 for the 2009 Booksellers' Choice Award.

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