The meteoric rise of Billy Rautenbach, the fugitive businessman wanted by the State for fraud and theft charges totalling R60 million, remains a mystery.
It has taken the Investigating Directorate: Serious Economic Offences (Idseo) more than a year of hard work to build a case against Rautenbach.
Idseo's breakthrough saw Rautenbach placed on a list of the 20 most important criminals in the country. He was believed to be fuelling the conflict in the Congo for personal gain.
Willie Hofmeyer, the head of the Asset Forfeiture Unit, impounded Rautenbach's executive Falcon jet and a helicopter at Rand Airport and seized a wine farm in the Cape, the Little Forest farm in the KwaZulu Natal midlands and three truckloads of documents from his luxury mansion in Sandhurst.
The documents have enabled Idseo to piece together and untangle a web of 150 companies that got the authorities excited. They span South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya and the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea.
According to court papers, Hyundai Motor Distribution British Virgin Islands (HMDBVI) placed orders with Hyundai Motor Corporation Korea.
HMDBVI then sold the vehicles to HMD Botswana, which assembled them and sold them to HMD South Africa at a much reduced price.
Physically the vehicles were shipped out of South Korea to Maputo, transported by rail or road to Botswana, booked into a warehouse and shipped to South Africa.
The fraud was then allegedly committed through the manipulation of the so-called free on board (FOB) value, which is the amount that an importer pays for goods.
"HMDB was the importer into the Southern African Customs Union (Sacu).
"However, instead of presenting Sacu with Korean invoices, it presented Sacu with HMDBVI-generated invoices representing a 35 percent reduction in FOB or approximately R60 million prejudice to Sacu," the court papers said.
The result was that Rautenbach was able to drastically undercut the competition.
In his affidavit he argued that the intention was not to prejudice or defraud Sacu; it made business sense to follow the route that he did. The FOB value used in this case was the true value for semi-knocked down vehicles, which had to be lower than that of completely built up vehicles.
The companies are grouped together under the flagship name Wheels of Africa, founded in 1972 by Wessel Rautenbach, Billy's father in the then Rhodesia.
Although Rautenbach has repeatedly denied that he was in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a pawn of the Zimbabwean government, it is through the activities of his father that observers have linked him to Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president.
Rautenbach's father not only entered into a partnership with Zanu-PF, Mugabe's party, to form a company called Quest Motors, but he remains a personal friend of the Zimbabwean president.
The family farm in Zimbabwe is strictly out of bounds for the war veterans.
These family connections were widely held to be responsible for Rautenbach's rise, without any background in mining, to the chairmanship of Gecamines, Kinshasa's State-owned copper and cobalt mining firm, about two years ago.
Laurent Kabila, the late Congolese leader, fired Rautenbach as chairman of Gecamines.
Rautenbach had paid Zimbabwean soldiers from the proceeds of Gecamines. He did not pay the Bamunyelengwa people, the local Congolese miners.
But Rautenbach is firmly believed to have finally met his Waterloo. Except for his farm and safari business in Zimbabwe, most of his businesses, including the Hyundai Motor Distribution and Dealership in South Africa and Botswana, and the lucrative Volvo franchise have slipped out of his grasp. In the process, he has left a trail of debt.
Now Rautenbach is on the run.
This week his lawyers insisted that he was "on leave" on his farm and not to be disturbed.
Rautenbach was born in white-ruled Rhodesia, and southern Africa has become his playground. And, as the Nguni say, when in doubt, especially when nothing seems to be going right for you, "Hamba Uyohlabela Amadlozi" - go back to your roots and kill a beast for the ancestors.
This is particularly important in a situation where any hopes for the jetset or Rolls Royce treatment have evaporated after the State has refused to enter into special bail arrangements with the lawyers.
"Our client is prepared to return to South Africa and surrender himself to the police and offer a substantial amount in respect of bail," his attorneys said.
"However, our client is an international businessman and he is therefore not prepared to so return in absence of an undertaking on your part that bail in an agreed amount would not be opposed and that he would not be deprived of his travel documents."
But, while welcoming Rautenbach's willingness to return voluntarily to face criminal charges, the Idseo said that because Rautenbach would be facing charges under schedule six of the Criminal Procedures Act, bail could only be granted under exceptional conditions.
"In any event, even if a court were to order bail, it is standard procedure to order the surrender of travel documents," the Idseo said.
"And in view of the seriousness of the charges against your client, the national directorate is not prepared to provide undertaking that an application for bail will not be opposed should your client surrender himself to the police."
This leaves an extradition process as the only way for Idseo to bring Rautenbach to South Africa to face what might be his last battle.
South Africa and Zimbabwe do not have an extradition treaty, but Idseo's Rodulf Mastenbroek said a bilateral extradition arrangement was not necessary because the two were members the Commonwealth group of nations bound by an umbrella extradition arrangement.
Observers are not sure that even this fact poses a threat at all to Rautenbach, whose political connections go beyond Emmerson Mnangagwa, the speaker of Zimbabwe's parliament, to include Mugabe.