Former taxmen lay bare SA's industrial sabotage

Johann van Loggerenberg, former head of the crime-busting unit at the SA Revenue Service, said: "It documents precisely how the interests of informants, state officials as well as private business overlap way beyond what could be considered proper."

Van Loggerenberg and former Sars spokesman Adrian Lackay have thrown a spotlight on complicity between state officials and private business in criminal activities in their book, Rogue: The Inside Story of Sars' Elite Crime-Busting Unit.

Van Loggerenberg and other managers were forced to resign after being implicated, wrongfully they said, in a scandal over a "rogue unit" operating at Sars.

They wrote the book to present their side of the story.

It documents secretly recorded conversations with handlers, industrial espionage, sabotage of business interests, secret payments and the "brief, yet damaging relationship" between Van Loggerenberg and a lawyer, Belinda Walter.

In the chapter, Double Game, he says that Walter invited him on a date "out of the blue" almost two months after their first meeting at his office in September 2013.

He initially had "no inkling of the depth of her involvement in the tobacco industry", but became concerned about ethical pitfalls when he learnt she was a lawyer for a tobacco firmwhile spying on them in her capacity as a "State Security Agency agent".

She was also chairman of the Fair-Trade Independent Tobacco Association.

During their relationship, Walter handed him, in his private capacity, data which he retrieved from her old cellphones and data cloud storage to "use as I wished".

He put the memory stick in a basket on top of his fridge, "thinking I would look at it later when I had a chance".

He went through the memory stick and "what I found was shocking to say the least".

"It documents how the interests of informants, state officials on the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, as well as private business overlap beyond what could be considered proper."

Van Loggerenberg believes that the data retrieved from Walter's old cellphones "lies at the heart of at least the initial attacks on me and Sars".