Lifestyle/Community
New Tannenbaum exposé: “The Grand Scam”
ant katz
As fugitives Barry Tannenbaum and his partner and lawyer Dean Rees were spending R5,000 per bottle of champagne SCHMOOZING & LURING INVESTORS on a yacht they were renting for R500,000 a day, Tannenbaum was blowing a whopping R62-mil on online poker gaming!
Sunday Times Business Times editor Rob Rose published a new book on the alleged Ponzi scheme by Barry Tannenbaum that fleeced wealthy businessmen of a reported R12.5-billion. Rose reveals Tannenbaum as a “con artist who stole investors’ cash to satisfy his voracious appetite for poker.”
PICTURED RIGHT: The conmen served R5,000 a bottle French champagne on this half-million a day rented yacht on the Med to lured their investors
Between 2005 and 2009, the heir to one of SA’s blue-blood families methodically constructed the largest-ever con in SA history. Barry Tannenbaum, the grandson of the Adcock Ingram’s founder, offered investors returns of more than 200 per cent a year by supposedly investing in the components used to make anti-retroviral drugs. But, says Rose, it was nothing more than a lie, which suckered the country’s business elite, including the former CEO of Pick n Pay, the one-time head of the JSE and the ex-boss of OK Bazaars.
In June 2009 it was exposed that hundreds of investors had ploughed over R12.5-billion into Tannenbaum’s scheme, dwarfing other famous SA cons like the Brett Kebble rip-off, Fidentia and the Krion pyramid scheme.
It proved to be the most embarrassing financial disaster in the country’s history, and it exposed holes in a banking and financial system billed as one of the safest in the world.
Rose exposes the fact that Tannenbaum spent over R62-milllion on online poker in a few short years.
For Tannenbaum’s victims, the nightmare continued after the scheme collapsed, as liquidators, tax officials and criminal investigators demanded their pound of flesh. Tannenbaum now works for an Australian insurance company and is living large in Runaway bay on Australia’s Gold Coast,
Senior public prosecutor Glynnis Breytenbach, who was in suspended in 2011(supposedly unlawfully to stop her prosecuting high profile criminal cases according to recent court judgements), was working to have Tannenbaum extradited at the time. No movement on the matter has been reported in the past two years.
