Former rail firm boss on the spot over shareholding fiasco

• S. African suspected to have played major role in stakeholder impasse at the RVR

He calculated that this was the opportune time to quickly offload his shell company to one of the shareholders quietly and leave the scene.
According to available documents, the first to be approached by Mr Puffet was Transcentury, who had by that time taken a higher profile than the rest of the shareholders in the KURH discussions.

Apparently, Mr Puffet had wanted a quick deal with Transcentury. He informed them to move fast as he had other offers.

As a matter of fact, Transcentury has said that Mr Puffet told them that he (Puffet) had been approached by Mirambo and Babcock Brown who had tried to persuade him to sell to Citadel Capital.

Keen to assume control of RVR, Trans-century easily accepted to deal with Sheltam. Transcentury calculated that by buying Mr Puffet’s 35 per cent stake, it could quickly assume the lead investor status in the company and thus obviate the need for KURH. Documents show that on October 29, 2009, Mr Puffet wrote to all shareholders requesting their consent to sell his shares to Transcentury.

At this stage, the argument that Mr Puffet had no capacity to sell the shares without the approval of the government had not come up.

The evidence also shows that during the period Transcentury was negotiating to buy Mr Puffet’s shares in Sheltam, the company was violently against the KURH option.

As it turned out, the deal between Mr Puffet and Transcentury did not happen.

Correspondence shows that when the shareholders received Mr Puffet’s request, all except Centum declined to approve the deal with Transcentury.

Seeds of discord

Still, the dealings betweeen Mr Puffet and Transcentury only served to sow seeds of discord among the shareholders.

On December 14, Mr Puffet sent another letter to the shareholders, this time requesting consent to sell to Citadel of Egypt. All the shareholders that had not consented by then sent a note to the government that they were prepared to go the KURH route.

Mr Puffet sold and took off for South Africa, leaving behind a board room of wrangling directors.