Gangster State

work in Mpumalanga since 2005. When I asked him why he had
changed his tune only after I asked him about the R 2 -million payment
to Myeni’s company, he told me the following: ‘You were not expressly
clear about what work we did in Mpumalanga as I understood that you
were requesting whether we had undertaken work directly for
Provincial Government. The work [in Mpumalanga] I refer to is for a
Private Developer hence I responded accordingly.’
In a follow-up email, Narsai claimed VNA had paid Myeni’s company
to take over the Mpumalanga development. He also said that he had
first been introduced to Thalente by Dudu Myeni, the latter’s mother
and Zuma’s ‘friend’.
Meanwhile, Thalente Myeni’s apparent involvement in the alleged
Durban ‘plot’ meetings in September 2018 raised further questions
about how he had been spending some of his earnings from ‘consulting
services’. As mentioned in the previous chapter, a Mercedes owned by
Myeni was one of the vehicles allegedly used to collect Magashule, his
mother, Dudu, and other ‘conspirators’ after one of the gatherings at a
Durban hotel.^37 Another Mercedes allegedly spotted on the scene
belonged to Empire Technology, the company owned by Shantan
Reddy, who later claimed that he was not in South Africa at the time.
Given the fact that Reddy’s Empire Technology had directly benefited
from a Free State contract and Myeni had been paid on at least one
occasion by a contractor to Magashule’s erstwhile province, I had to
wonder about the links between the various players and the alleged
clandestine fightback operation against Ramaphosa. Myeni did not
respond to queries, but Reddy strongly denied that he had been
involved in any such scheming. In fact, he claimed that he did not
know Myeni at all. ‘Our client and/or its directors further deny being