A Mareva order is the most stringent legal sanction that can be applied to a businessman. It is never imposed lightly, as an injunction is a last resort to rein in rampant capitalists, freezing bank accounts and seize assets wherever they are located in the world.
On February 18 the Malaysian high court, for the first time, ordered this draconian injunction against one of the country's most prodigal sons, Abu Hassan Samsudin.
At the same time the JSE Securities Exchange suspended Samrand Development Holdings, a property group owned by Samsudin, after it failed to submit its preliminary report within the required time.
In 1994 savvy businessman Samsudin arrived in South Africa with great aplomb and money to spend. Ten years later he is a fugitive here and owes South Africa answers over looting public firms in which he held majority shareholdings. He took real people's real money.
To avoid sequestration, his estranged wife, Melleney Samsudin, is attempting to upturn fundamental South African laws of marriage and divorce, and is living behind guarded electric walls - a virtual cage with golden bars in Oxford Avenue, Sandhurst.
Melleney felt insecure being married solely under sharia, or Islamic rite, which is not yet recognised in South Africa. "I have been portrayed as a gold-digger and a shameless hussy and it's very hurtful," the socialite once said. So a civil marriage, either by accident or design, left her in community of property.
At the time that may have seemed a good option as she brought little into the marriage.
But in for the up means in for the down, and now creditors are calling in the cards and she is trying to convince the Pietermaritzburg high court that the governing marriage is the one concluded in Malaysia in 1994.
She has been left carrying the can. She's not even taking calls, and fields all inquiries through attorney Brian Kahn, who was not available this week.
What happened?
At 35, Samsudin sold his first company for R3 billion. A derelict sawmill in east Malaysia, revamped to exploit Borneo's priceless rainforests.
Such are the costs of launching a capital career.
Samsudin became an influential and charming scion of the Malay ruling elite, a bumiputra (son of the soil) rescuing the Malaysian economy from the dominant Chinese.
A colleague of the minister of finance at the time, Samsudin rode the Asian Tiger high and fast in the early 1990s, taking the cream of government tenders. The Kuala Lumpur stock exchange called him Midas.
The Malaysian governing party, Umno, intensified its direct interest in South Africa after the ANC was unbanned in 1990.
Samsudin was dispatched to South Africa in 1993 as Malaysian investment's advance guard. The Malaysian state-linked corporate sector became a major funder of the ANC election campaign, injecting R6 million just before the 1994 elections, according to research conducted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Samsudin bought 700ha of prime commercial land on the Ben Schoeman highway between Johannesburg and Pretoria just two weeks before the 1994 elections and married a local girl, Melleney Miller.
On his return to Kuala Lumpur, Samsudin was ostracised by his compatriots. He had aggravated his political principals by acting without due consultation in South Africa, and added insult to injury by bringing home a Penthouse Pet.
The couple married in splendour, affronting Islamic tradition - not to mention his other two wives, who were sidelined.
Within a year he controlled the New Republic Bank (NRB) and the media was abuzz, crediting Samsudin as the "man with the Midas touch" who invested R1 billion when the transitional economy was crying out for foreign cash.
But the holding companies were registered in offshore tax havens such as the Virgin Islands and the Caymans.
An empire of two dozen companies sprouted like Jack's beanstalk around Samsudin, spanning the banking sector, property and leisure markets.
By the mid-1990s, a dozen companies had been formed, including four listed on the JSE: Samrand Development Holdings, Buildmax, NRB Holdings and SMG Holdings. Of these, only Buildmax remains.
The listing of SMG Holdings and Samrand were recently suspended, the latter having reported an attributable loss of R1.8 billion in the six months to September 2000.
Problems at the Samsudin empire emerged in 1999 when he tried to sell NRB, in which he had a 72 percent interest, to Mawenzi Resources, owned by Mzi Khumalo, for R490 million.
Intense publicity arising from a due diligence report caused a run on the bank and drove NRB into insolvency in 1999, leaving it with liabilities exceeding assets by R28 million. Details aside, South Africans lost at least R300 million of their savings.
This put the focus on other deals, including the loss of stockbroking firm Mathison & Hollidge and the sale of a 50 percent stake in the Emfuleni Safari casino resort on the Vaal to consortium partner London Clubs.
By 2001, Samrand reportedly had disposed of its shareholding in Samrand Mitrajaya Development and property for the development of the Samrand Golf & Country Estate in Midrand for a total of R41.4 million cash.
Samsudin was quoted then as saying the assets had been disposed of to Golden Paradise International, a subsidiary of Mitrajaya Holdings of Malaysia, and Mitrajaya South Africa.
Liquidator Pierre de Villiers Berrange has been on his trail since 1998, representing the NRB depositors whose savings disappeared. Going after NRB's parent, NRB Holdings, he discovered Samsudin had plundered its coffers.
Here began his painstaking exploration of a complex maze of firms and stockbrokers.
Where was the money? Offshore, without the permission of the Reserve Bank.
Berrange alleges that in denuding NRB Holdings of its assets, Samsudin showed "no respect for the company laws of South Africa". Samsudin is alleged to have spirited away at least R80 million of NRB Holdings' cash and assets, as reported by Moneyweb.
As it turned out, NRB was owned by Samsudin via Redbridge assets, a registered firm in tax haven in the Virgin Islands. The money was long gone and Berrange switched his focus to Samsudin and his wife.
The couple evidently had expensive tastes, verging on the ostentatious. In 1998 they were mugged in a London street, losing about R12 million in jewellery, according to Sapa-AP.
In December 2003 Berrange had the estates of both Samsudin and Melleney Samsudin sequestrated. On February 16 Berrange won an application to have Samsudin's key company, SMG Holdings, placed in provisional liquidation. He also won the application for the Mareva award.
The receivers of NRB, Stuart Waymark and Andrew Wilkins, will be pursuing the provisional liquidation of Samrand. The legal net is closing, but it is unclear how much will be recovered. - Robert Jean-Jacques and Kenneth Chikanga