JOHANNESBURG - Coca Cola Africa Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Coca Cola Company, is the latest in a long string of prominent companies to fall victim to company hijacking this year. Last month, all the legitimate directors - including Bill Egbe, Brett Naidoo and William Asiko - were ‘resigned' on the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (CIPRO) database. According to CIPRO records they were then replaced on November 11 by a single individual: one ‘Samuel Sadike'.

This hijacking appears to be linked to numerous others that were carried out by a syndicate - or syndicates - since at least January this year (see list of 35 below). The modus operandi of the fraudsters is to deregister the legitimate directors of a company and insert one of their own. The new director will then try to open a new bank account in the name of the company. In most of the previous cases there was then an attempt to divert tax refund money due to the legitimate company into the fraudulent account.

In early October the Democratic Alliance called for the "immediate establishment of a forensic investigation team - comprised of CIPRO, SARS, and the banks - to probe this scam and investigate ways to curtail this type of fraud."

In their response the Department of Trade and Industry accused the DA of an "opportunistic obsession with events of the past which CIPRO has been responding to for a while now, and is successfully transcending through series of interventions to strengthen administrative controls and close loopholes that are being identified."

More recently, after Politicsweb began publishing the names of victimised companies, CIPRO told Moneyweb that there had been no more reported cases of company hijacking since new controls were implemented in mid-October. However, in addition to Coca Cola Africa Politicsweb is aware of a number of other cases of company hijackings that post-date the new security measures.

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