FSCA sets aside Coenie Botha’s CBI Global Ponzi fine
Under murky circumstances, the FSCA has quietly dropped previously imposed penalties against CBI Global Ponzi scammer Coenie Botha.
As per an October 7th filed consent order, the FSCA’s previous finding that Coenie Botha (right) and CBI Global violated South Africa’s Banks Act has been set aside.
Circumstances leading up to the filing of the consent order are unclear. Ditto whether any money changed hands.
The consent order has the FSCA’s case against Botha and CBI Global “remitted to the Financial Sector Conduct Authority for further consideration”.
Looking at the FSCA’s track record against MLM Ponzi schemes, this is probably code for “the case will remain in limbo in the hope everyone forgets about it”.
Cases brought against MLM Ponzi scammers by the FSCA are significant, in that it’s rare for the regulator to take action. Unfortunately in the few instances the FSCA does hand out punishment, it seems all too easy to have these orders reversed.
Mirror Trading International (MTI) was a $1.7 billion Ponzi scheme that originated in South Africa.
Despite being one of South Africa’s largest scams and MTI collapsing four years ago, nobody in South Africa has been criminally charged.
After fleeing South Africa, MTI Johannes Steynberg died in Brazil earlier this year. Clynton Marks and Cheri Ward, the suspected owners of MTI, remain at large in South Africa.
After finding MTI to be an “illegal operation” in 2020, the FSCA announced it might fine MTI R100 million in 2021. The fine was then reduced to R50 million, before being dropped altogether in April 2022.
CBI Global began as Uhuru Tribe, an MLM crypto Ponzi launched in or around 2020. By March 2022, BehindMLM had tracked four Coenia Botha Ponzi collapses.
While CBI Global primarily defrauded South Africans, Coenie Botha ran the Ponzi from Namibia. This prompted local criminal and civil fraud proceedings.
The last update on CBI civil fraud proceedings is from July 2023, wherein the Bank of Namibia overturned a court order directing it to fund CBI Global’s fraudulent business operations.
Botha was arrested in March 2024 on CBI Global criminal charges. Our last update on those proceedings is from June 2024, wherein Namibian Police rocked up to court only to deny knowledge of the case.
There have been no updates since, suggesting that case is also likely dead in the water.
Wow, no wonder we have so many ponzi scammers in South Africa. They seem to get away with it.
In the bigger scheme of things Namibia before independence was South Africa’s fifth province. It still is effectively. The Afrikaner elite in the region swapped political control, to African nationalists on the basis that they would remain overlords of the economy.
Botha, who started his working life as a clerk administering petty apartheid (but now has a mixed race partner – the kind of thing he policed and forbade), will get away with anything