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Bigger Than The Weather II: The corporate cover-up goes deeper

Bigger Than The Weather II: The corporate cover-up goes deeper

In July 2016, we published an investigative feature that implicated the TUI Group, the world’s largest travel and tourism conglomerate, in a web of deceit and fraud that involved the deaths at sea of three South African sailors. The story reached over 100,000 readers worldwide, and was picked up by the international pro sailing community. We have since learnt that the cover-up goes a lot deeper than we reported, and that one or more of the sailors “almost certainly” could have been saved. TUI has been found guilty of manslaughter before: could it happen again? By KEVIN BLOOM.

I. The Fall Guy

There could have been any number of reasons that nothing had been heard from Anthony Murray’s yacht in two weeks. Louis Makendlana had dealt with this sort of thing before—he’d been with the company for eleven years, had started back when it was still an independent outfit run out of the Elliot Basin in Cape Town, and he knew the reason could’ve been something as simple as a broken satellite phone. But when the office began fielding daily calls from Murray’s family, he decided to check the weather charts. What he saw froze his blood.

A category 5 cyclone had swept through the southern Indian Ocean between 11 January and 18 January 2015, slamming into the course that Murray’s yacht had been sailing that week. Makendlana immediately contacted his bosses in Florida, USA. He was thanked for his input, assured that the matter would be handled from there. While he didn’t hold out hope for a successful rescue, Makendlana did assume that his bosses would do what was right—that they would break the news to the sailors’ families, that they would call a search party for the vessel, that the company’s role in the incident would be acknowledged and the blame evenly shared. On all counts, it turned out, Makendlana assumed wrong.

“Look, I’ve lost everything,” he would tell the Daily Maverick close on two years later. “They can’t take anything more away from me.”

The date was 11 October 2016, and the venue was an address in the suburb of Monte Vista, Cape Town—which was proof enough of Makendlana’s abiding concern that they could, in fact, take more away from him. As a condition for his agreeing to talk, the Daily Maverick had not been allowed access to Makendlana’s own address or personal cell phone number.

The “they” he had agreed to talk about was TUI Marine, the world’s largest yacht charter company, a subsidiary of the TUI Group, the world’s largest travel and tourism conglomerate—a fully entwined pair of entities that had played starring roles in a 10,000-word investigative feature published in the Daily Maverick in July 2016. With 76,000 global employees, more than 300 hotels and over 140 aircraft to its name, the TUI Group’s turnover for the 2014/15 financial year had topped €20 billion. By contrast, since being fired by TUI in December 2015, Makendlana—a father of three—had not earned a cent in income.

He now had nothing but time to obsess over his questions. Was it a set-up from the start? Was he naïve to think his bosses would protect him? Why had two local law firms and the South African maritime regulator ignored the fact that he’d been instructed to break the law? The only answers he could come up with was that TUI wanted none of it exposed.

The reason for his dismissal, Makendlana alleged, had everything to do with the term “fall guy”. As the logistics manager at Mariner Yachts, the registered name of TUI Marine’s South African office, he was responsible for the paperwork that had to accompany every vessel leaving Cape Town harbour for the company’s charter fleets around the world. All the vessels that Makendlana handled were catamarans bought from local boatbuilders Robertson and Caine, and whether they were to be ferried across the ocean on cargo ships—like those marked for the fleets in the Caribbean and Mediterranean—or were to be sailed across on their own hulls—like those marked for the Thai islands—the most important item of paperwork was the same. This was the document that linked the vessel to a portable chunk of hardware known as the Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB. Without it, a rescue crew wouldn’t know where to look in the event of a catastrophe at sea.

According to testimony he would later include in a sworn affidavit, Makendlana had been acting on orders from TUI Marine’s head office when, between 2013 and 2015, he had serially contravened South Africa’s Merchant Shipping Regulations by forging upwards of a hundred EPIRB registration certificates. In order for the yachts loaded on transport ships to be granted a temporary South African pass, which was required for clearance to sail on to TUI’s charter operations from distribution ports in the Mediterranean and Gulf of Mexico, a “fully functioning, activated and registered” EPIRB was mandatory. As he testified in the affidavit, and as he would repeat to the Daily Maverick, Makendlana had expedited “delays to TUI’s schedules” by “using tippex correction fluid and/or cutting and sticking numbers from other pieces of paper in order to change the vessel name on a pre-existing [EPIRB] certificate.”   

Which brings us to the EPIRB certificate assigned to the catamaran identified as Moorings A5130. Sometimes, when there were problems with the registration process for yachts that were to be sailed to Thailand on their own hulls, Makendlana would revert to the habit he’d developed on the shipped vessels. Moorings A5130, the yacht that collided with Cyclone Bansi in mid-January 2015, was one such case. The deaths at sea of skipper Anthony Murray (age 58), first mate Reginald Robertson (age 59), and deckhand Jaryd Payne (age 20), would weigh like an anchor on Makendlana’s conscience. Without a functioning EPIRB, he knew, the chances of a successful search and rescue had been close to zero. Also, Makendlana had long owed Murray a debt of gratitude—the skipper had taught him the workings of the industry back in 2004, when he was 25 and new to the job. Was this how he repaid the man? 

Photo: A forged Icasa document.

“Mistakes were made,” Makendlana admitted to the Daily Maverick in October 2016. “Things that shouldn’t have happened, happened.”

But what he hadn’t counted on was that TUI Marine would do everything in its power to hide these mistakes from the grieving families.

II. Quick, Moving Along

Sometime in June 2015, a day that Makendlana could only remember as “a Monday”, he was called into a meeting at the offices of Cape Town law firm Shepstone & Wiley. Waiting for him there was Alan Britz, a ship surveyor employed by the South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA), and Johan Swart, an attorney representing TUI Marine. The meeting, as Makendlana recalled it, was brief—he was shown copies of various EPIRB certificates he’d forged, including the cut-and-paste job he’d done on Moorings A5130, and was asked whether he recognised the documents.

“I said, ‘yes’,” Makendlana told the Daily Maverick. “Johan said, ‘Okay, we are going to stop now, because this might incriminate you. You will need a legal representative’.”

That this meeting did in fact happen, although Makendlana could not provide a date, was lent credence by a letter he received on 22 June 2015. Addressed from the desk of Anthony Wighting, who managed the Cape Town outpost from a larger TUI Marine base in the United Kingdom, the letter informed Makendlana that the company intended placing him on “suspension with full pay pending investigation”. The charges against Makendlana included his “failure to follow due and proper documentary procedures with the registration and reprogramming of EPIRBs.”

Makendlana was further warned in the letter that the nature of the allegations could “oblige the company to file a criminal complaint with the South African Police Service.” He was invited to make a written representation as to why he should not be suspended—which had to be completed and submitted by 14h00 that day—and was asked to hand in his laptop and office keys at the door.

He did write the response by 14h00, Makendlana assured the Daily Maverick, although he didn’t have a copy because, again, he’d been told to return his laptop. What he wrote, he said, was that he’d been acting on the instructions of John LeFevre, his direct superior in Florida, USA, when he committed the frauds. The affidavit that Makendlana would sign on 8 March 2016 would square with this version of events.

“Sometime in 2013 I sent LeFevre an email raising concerns about the registration process,” he would testify. “I understood that my instructions were to do whatever it takes to obtain the registrations.”

But regardless of the contents of his attempt to keep his job, it didn’t impress TUI Marine. Because on 15 July 2015, Makendlana received another letter from Wighting, informing him that his submission had been considered, and that “pending finalisation of the internal investigation” the company had chosen to enforce the suspension. It was also stated that he would be advised of the outcome of the investigation in due course.

Was there such an investigation? If there was, Makendlana would never see evidence of it—and neither would the Daily Maverick. What Makendlana would see instead was a 14-page document entitled “Findings in Respect of a Disciplinary Hearing between Mariner Yachts (PTY) LTD T/A TUI Marine against Mr Louis Makendlana”.

Dated 14 August 2015, the document cited one Grant Nirenstein of Knowles Husain Lindsay Incorporated as the chairperson, and Antony Wighting “in his capacity as the global technical director of TUI Marine” as the company representative. Following a two-page preamble, the entire contents of which covered Nirenstein’s attempts to postpone the hearing so as to give Makendlana extra time to prepare—the reason he declined, Makendlana told the Daily Maverick, was that it was obvious to him his fate had already been sealed—the findings moved onto the charges. 

The second charge was the nub of the matter, dealing as it did with Makendlana’s failure to “diligently arrange” for the registration of EPIRBs with the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), and in particular his failure “by his own admission” to do so in respect of Moorings A5130.

Makendlana, it stated in the next section of the findings, pled guilty to the charge—after enduring what read like a lengthy lecture on his “responsibilities” from Wighting. During the scolding, Wighting asserted that without the loss of Moorings A5130, the frauds would never have come to light. And then the findings noted this: “Mr Wighting was quick to mention that Mr Makendlana’s failure to comply with the relevant regulations did not directly cause the loss of [Moorings A5130], nor did it cause the loss of the three lives of the crew on board the said vessel.”

On the first point, Wighting could not be faulted—the loss of Moorings A5130 was “directly” caused by the weather, in the form of Cyclone Bansi. It was on the second point, however, that the TUI executive may have betrayed himself in his eagerness to move along—because if any of the sailors had survived the storm, a functioning EPIRB could have guided other ships to the area within the timeframe necessary to save them.

III. Signs of Life

The international search and rescue operation for the yacht Moorings A5130 began on 12 February 2015, a full 25 days after the last communication had been received from skipper Anthony Murray’s satellite phone. As the Daily Maverick established in the first investigation of this series, the search was called by the families of the missing crew and not by TUI Marine—although, in its press releases, the company would continue to claim the opposite. The Daily Maverick further established, via a search and rescue notification out of Australia’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC), that in the vastness of the Southern Ocean a realistic cut-off point for locating a stricken 13-metre yacht—and any human beings who might be clinging to it—was significantly less than three-and-a-half weeks.

As per the JRCC’s notification:

“Due to the size of the search area (over 2 million square nautical miles) and the distance offshore (over 2000 nautical miles) the area is impracticable to search by aircraft. JRCC Australia has investigated satellite interrogation of the search area, however due to the size of the target, resolution of satellite images and size of the search area, this too is impracticable.”

But there was something else. In an interview with the Daily Maverick in March 2016, John Titterton, a former employee of TUI Marine and one of South Africa’s most experienced yachtsmen, explained what would have happened had an EPIRB signal been received within 48 hours of the vessel succumbing to the storm: “If there was a ship, and there were ships from what I can understand within close proximity of that vessel, they would have been diverted and they would have assisted. There’s always the possibility that they could have found life on board that boat. Who knows? Now nobody will ever know.”

As it turned out, although it was indeed true that nobody could know for sure, this “possibility” was closer to a probability

On 14 January 2016, as we reported in our initial investigation, the upturned hull of a Leopard 44 catamaran was spotted by a Brazilian navy ship within 80 nautical miles of the South African coast. Interpreting the event as a near-miraculous opportunity for closure, the families and friends of the missing sailors prevailed on the authorities to investigate. On 23 January, the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) dispatched an inflatable rescue craft, which located the vessel and sent down a team of divers. The catamaran was positively identified as Moorings A5130 when the divers surfaced with more than seven minutes of video footage.

Back in March, Titterton shared this footage with the Daily Maverick. At the time, he hadn’t yet analysed the contents—and so the viewing, more haunting than revelatory, did not get a mention in the original article. But by October, when the Daily Maverick returned to his home in Cape Town for a follow-up interview, Titterton had applied his extensive knowledge of the Leopard 44 to each individual frame. Not only had he completed dozens of ocean crossings in this type of vessel himself, he reminded us, but he had served for a year as TUI Marine’s chief inspector for all boats out of the Robertson and Caine yard.

At five minutes and 20 seconds, Titterton paused the video. “See that,” he said, “the escape hatch is missing, but the frame appears to be in place.”

He then walked the Daily Maverick through the implications. “The Leopard 44 catamaran has an escape hatch built into the floor,” he said, “which can be opened if the boat is inverted, to allow survivors to get out. This escape hatch has four locking leavers to prevent it from opening, and then has a securing bar installed to make it only open-able from inside. The escape hatch frame looks to be in place, but the actual hatch is missing. To me, this suggests that somebody was alive after the catamaran was flipped—and physically removed the securing bar and opened the hatch, which then broke off because of the breaking seas.”

Photo: Missing escape hatch.

At six minutes and 38 seconds, with the NSRI diver having swum into the upside-down saloon, Titterton paused the video again. He pointed to a blue 25-litre plastic drum, which could be seen floating under the saloon’s tabletop.

“One of the requirements for doing a delivery,” he told the Daily Maverick, “is to have sufficient potable water in containers in case of an emergency. The skippers buy drums for extra fuel and for emergency water before leaving Cape Town. Fresh water is heavier than seawater, and so a full container of fresh water will sink and not float. It seems that the blue drum is empty as it’s fully buoyant, which indicates to me that somebody consumed the contents. As skippers, we would never use any of the potable water unless in an emergency.”

Photo: Empty water drum floating under tabletop.

IV. Disrespect for the Dead

Trevor Payne was away on business in Canada when the news came through that one or more of the crew “almost certainly” survived the cyclone. His wife Nicole, who was at home in Swaziland, took the call from Titterton. Her first thought, she told the Daily Maverick, was that if there was just one survivor, it was probably her stepson Jaryd—the 20-year-old deckhand, who was close on four decades younger than the skipper and first mate, and was also “incredibly fit and strong.”

As for TUI Marine, Jaryd Payne’s father and stepmother were in agreement: the company had caused the death of their son. “This is an enormous sore point in our lives,” said Trevor, during a telephone interview in November 2016. “Irrespective of your religious beliefs, it’s hard to see how a survivor wouldn’t have been praying for a rescue every single second. In my opinion, it’s like murder, really.”

Were these just the words of a heartbroken father, a man looking for someone to blame? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that TUI Marine had been vilified in the media for committing an act “like murder”. In fact, it wouldn’t even be the first time in 2016.

On 11 August 2016, less than three weeks after the Daily Maverick feature had gone to press, BBC News published an item under the header “Mother ‘treated like flotsam’ by Sunsail after daugher’s death”. Sunsail, as we noted in July, is TUI Marine’s major customer-facing brand—“the world’s largest sailing and watersports holiday company,” according to the website, with over 800 yachts in 25 locations worldwide. In July 2003, it was at the company’s Greek location that 11-year-old Laura Morgan drowned, when the small sailboat she was piloting flipped. Five Sunsail employees were charged with manslaughter, and a Greek court upheld three of the convictions in March 2006. During the drawn-out appeal process—in December 2008, the Supreme Court of Athens upheld the conviction of two of the men for a third time—a civil case was launched by the Morgan family. Damages of €240,000 were awarded in September 2011.

But here again, the company would not easily submit to the authority of the Greek courts. In June 2013, when its first claim appeal was rejected, TUI escalated the appeal to the Supreme Court, refusing in the interim to pay a cent. In May 2014, the Greek Supreme Court suspended half of the amount pending the outcome of another hearing, and still TUI refused to make good. Six months later a promise of imminent payment came through from TUI’s lawyers, but this was just one more promise the executives failed to keep. In March 2016, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal and ordered TUI to settle “with costs”; when another four months lapsed without word from the bank, the family’s lawyers issued a final letter of demand. Eventually, in August 2016, a British court awarded the family an “undisclosed sum”—which was when TUI assented to pay.

Lynne Morgan, Laura’s mother, declined to speak to the Daily Maverick on the grounds of “fatigue”. She had, however, spoken to the BBC. “It has been absolutely horrific because for 13 years I have had to repeatedly go over and over all the details of how my beautiful daughter died,” she said, adding that in all those years—which accounted for all of 13 court appearances—the company had shown “complete contempt” for Laura, herself and her family.

For Trevor and Nicole Payne, it was a familiar tale of abuse. “We have just been handled so inhumanely,” said Nicole, “I don’t know how these people sleep at night.” Trevor was less generous. “They have no respect for us. We are pawns in their chess game. They don’t give a fuck whatsoever.”

V. In Pursuit of the Grandmaster

On 8 March 2016, when Louis Makendlana met with the lawyers of the grieving families to prepare his affidavit, his motives could only have been remorse or revenge (or both)—there was nothing material for him to gain. The termination agreement he had signed in December 2015 included a confidentiality clause that forbade him from making “disparaging or derogatory statements” about TUI Marine, any breach of which would entitle the company to full reimbursement of his severance package. The size of Makendlana’s severance package? All of R15,000, equal to one month’s salary, after eleven years of service.

John LeFevre, Makendlana’s direct boss, did not sign the termination agreement himself—that part was handled by the company’s attorney in South Africa, Johan Swart. But in most of the other documents that Makendlana shared with the Daily Maverick, LeFevre was the main act.

Aside from the claim that LeFevre had instructed Makendlana, in 2013, “to do whatever it takes to obtain the [EPIRB] registrations”, the affidavit also included testimony on the events of late January and early February 2015, immediately after the line to Moorings A5130 went dead. Makendlana explained how twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it was the responsibility of his colleague Nicky Murison-Burt to send a “vessel delivery report” via email to select TUI staff, updating them on the status of each delivery voyage out of Cape Town. The recipients of this report, Makendlana added, included LeFevre, Wighting, and international vice president of operations, Peter Cochran—who, if they were reading the emails, would have noticed that Moorings A5130 had registered a series of no-shows.

“Once the yacht had failed to arrive at its destination,” Makendlana then testified, “Murison-Burt and I were told by LeFevre not to communicate with anyone and that all communication should be through LeFevre or Peter Cochran.”

There is every reason to believe that, by this point, LeFevre was aware of Cyclone Bansi. Not only was there Makendlana’s claim that he had alerted LeFevre to the storm himself, but Murison-Burt—as per our first feature—had apparently been told of it by both Bryan Holloway, who was skipper Anthony Murray’s weather router, and Andrew Joos, who was the delivery skipper in the catamaran just ahead of Murray’s. Also, according to Murray’s sister-in-law Diane Coetzer, Murison-Burt had mentioned something “unforgettable” to her during a phone conversation on 5 February 2015: “They ran into a bit of bad weather,” she’d said. Would Murison-Burt, whose job it was to collate and distribute the vessel delivery reports, have shared such information with Coetzer but not with her own bosses?

And yet LeFevre, once his hold on “all communications” had been established, kept up the pretense that this storm—with winds in excess of 137 knots and waves as high as 60 metres—had not happened.

Watch: Sailing the Southern Ocean in a storm significantly weaker than Cyclone Bansi.

On 21 and 22 February 2015, almost three weeks past the expected date of arrival of Moorings A5130 in Phuket, he exchanged a series of emails with Trevor Payne. The exchange began with LeFevre telling the families that there was nothing new to report: no response from the crews’ satellite or cell phones, no news out of the international search and rescue operation, and “no change in the status of the EPIRB”. On behalf of the families, who were still holding out hope, Payne responded with a number of questions relating to the recharging of batteries on the EPIRB and phones, but mostly he wanted to know how an “experienced skipper” like Murray could be “20 days out on his ETA”.   

LeFevre dealt quickly with the battery issue—the boat was equipped with solar panels and a generator, he wrote—and then came around in the next day’s update to the trickier question. His reply was that “the authorities [felt] this delivery could have taken up to 4 months.” He signed off the email with these words: “Will keep you updated, we are still very positive that this [is] all due to just very slow going on the delivery.”

Photo: John LeFevre email to Trevor Payne, 22 February 2015.

It was entirely possible, of course, that LeFevre’s “authorities” were the chiefs of the international search and rescue operation, whose best-case scenario was that the yacht had been delayed by Cyclone Bansi, its communication systems destroyed but its structure intact. And yet if that was the case, it still didn’t explain why LeFevre had not told the families that the reason for the delay was the storm.

Was he trying to keep the families calm, or was Cyclone Bansi not the only thing he was concealing?

VI. The Disclaimer as Art

“I suppose no news is good news as far as the EPIRB is concerned,” Trevor Payne wrote to LeFevre, in the opening paragraph of his response to the update of 21 February 2015. It was now a month and three days since the last communication had been received from Moorings A5130, and TUI Marine was sticking to its original line that the EPIRB would “reveal everything”. As the Daily Maverick reported in July 2016, this was what Murison-Burt had been telling the families in the days after the yacht failed to make Phuket. From 5 February 2015, when Coetzer first contacted the TUI Marine office in Cape Town, it would take more than seven weeks until the families discovered that the EPIRB certificate had been forged.

Despite repeated requests for A5130’s paperwork, we reported, the families would not receive the documents until after 12 February 2015, when South Africa’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC), a division of SAMSA, initiated the search and rescue operation in tandem with JRCC Australia. John Titterton, who was approached by the families for help on the radio call signs in March 2015, offered his assistance on the documents as well. It was Titterton who noticed the irregularities on the EPIRB certificate, and whose suspicions were confirmed when he called the ICASA Cape Town office on 27 March 2015—the licence number on the form, he was told, had been issued to an altogether different boat. The extent of the cut-and-paste job was exposed a few days later, when Storme Robertson, first mate Reg Robertson’s daughter, passed the form on to her fiancé Alex Piddington, a graphic designer.

But apart from Makendlana’s later testimony, was there any evidence to suggest that LeFevre knew about the fraud at this point too?  

In his affidavit, Makendlana claimed that in March 2015, soon after Moorings A5130 went missing, TUI Marine was preparing a shipment of yachts for Europe. “On 13 March 2015 I sent an email to LeFevre,” he testified, “in which I mentioned that the yachts were not equipped with full safety equipment, that there were no life rafts and that I would have to falsify the skipper’s name. I informed LeFevre that I was uncomfortable with these illegal activities after what had happened to the missing yacht and crew.”

Makendlana added that LeFevre’s reply, once again, was to do whatever was necessary. He then stated: “This email, and the email of 2013 […] above, was sent from my work computer to which I no longer have access.”

This time, however, the written findings of the disciplinary hearing would corroborate Makendlana’s version word-for-word. The third charge in the hearing dealt with Makendlana’s fraudulent representations to SAMSA that the EPIRBs and radio equipment had been registered with ICASA—to which, as on the second charge, he pled guilty. But unlike the former charge, where he offered no defense, Makendlana now told the chairperson about his email to LeFevre.

“At this stage,” the findings noted, “the parties looked through their email records and ultimately located correspondence between Mr Makendlana and Mr John LeFevre dated 13 March 2015. In the email addressed by Mr Makendlana to Mr LeFevre, Mr Makendlana mentions, inter alia, that the boats were not equipped with full safety equipment, which was a hurdle he could sort out with the inspector, that there were no life rafts with serial numbers and that he would have to falsify the skipper’s name. He also wrote that he was uncomfortable with doing same particularly after what happened with the missing crew.”

And LeFevre’s response, as per the written findings? “We will need to have them Louis, we will rethink it going forward what are you doing with Tortolo ships?” 

Whatever “Tortolo ships” meant, the chairperson of the disciplinary hearing, Grant Nirenstein, did not consider it relevant—even if the argument could have been made that the lack of punctuation from “rethink it going forward” to this clearly unconnected matter appeared to suggest that LeFevre was impatient and annoyed. Instead of focusing on the tenor of the email, Nirenstein handed the floor over to TUI’s representative at the hearing, Anthony Wighting.

“Mr Wighting placed on record that he was concerned as to the authenticity of the said emails,” the findings continued, “but was not willing to concede—even if the emails were authentic—that Mr LeFevre’s response constituted any form of consent to Mr Makendlana’s conduct.”

How Makendlana could have had the foresight to forge the emails, given that his work computer was confiscated the day he was informed of suspension proceedings, must have likewise seemed irrelevant.

“On my examination of Mr LeFevre’s email,” Nirenstein wrote, “and assuming that such email is authentic, I could not conclude that the email amounted to a consent to Mr Makendlana’s conduct.” He then composed another pair of sentences that said essentially the same thing, the combined effect of which was to shift the focus back to where his firm—Knowles Husain Lindsay Incorporated—had been contracted to put it in the first place: on Louis Makendlana.

“Even so and for the sake of argument, if one were to conclude that Mr LeFevre consented to such devious conduct, that would not detract from the fact that Mr Makendlana was forging documentation for submission to a statutory authority which is entirely unacceptable. To the extent that Mr LeFevre may have consented or been aware of Mr Makendlana’s conduct (which I am unable to conclude), this cannot be used to substantiate Mr Makendlana’s conduct.”

VII. The Waiting Game

John LeFevre did not respond to the questions the Daily Maverick sent to him on 21 November 2016. Neither did we receive a response from Marion Telsnig, Sunsail’s head of public relations and sustainable development. Our first unanswered question focused on Makendlana’s allegation that he’d been ordered to commit the fraud, and the next two on the dates that LeFevre became aware of Cyclone Bansi and the falsified EPIRB. It was to our final question, however, that we really wanted a reply.

Why, when Makendlana’s disciplinary hearing found him solely responsible for forging the EPIRB, were the families not informed?

“We weren’t told by anyone at TUI that Louis was even fired,” said Jeremy Savage, Anthony Murray’s brother, in October 2016. In other words, Makendlana was the “fall guy” for internal purposes alone.

Equally troubling was the fact that Makendlana’s fraud wasn’t mentioned in SAMSA’s “Preliminary Enquiry Report” into the loss of Moorings A5130, even though he had received his suspension letter on 22 June 2015 and the report was released on 6 July. While there was an annexure to the report that dealt with the “questions posed to Louis Makendlana dated 1 June 2015,” this was ostensibly a red herring—because the answers to the follow-up questions put to him three days later, questions that went to the very heart of the cover-up, were nowhere to be found in the 41-page document.

“Previously I posed a question to TUI regarding who conducted oversight of your employment,” wrote Alan Britz, SAMSA ship surveyor and the report’s author, on 4 June 2015. “Their answer was that oversight is conducted by the ‘Operations and Logistics departments of the Moorings and Sunsail divisions’. What is the nature of the oversight conducted by this division, and who specifically has done this oversight? When last did the above oversight take place?”

Of course, if Makendlana’s role was never going to make it into Brtiz’s report, neither was LeFevre’s. As outlined by the Daily Maverick in July 2016, the gist of the report was “skipper error”—implying that Murray, aided and abetted by weather router Bryan Holloway, had brought the disaster upon himself. None of the SAMSA executives contacted for comment on these findings have yet replied to the Daily Maverick. The maritime regulator was silent when our first article was published, and they have remained silent since. Was it a coincidence in this regard that SAMSA and TUI Marine shared the same firm of attorneys in South Africa? The conflict was noted in our original article, and nobody from Shepstone & Wiley wrote a letter to object.        

As for Britz, word was he left the country one month after his preliminary enquiry report appeared. According to Linkedin, he currently works as a surveyor for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority in Cairns, a position he has held since November 2015.

But it is the dead to which this story keeps returning. Anthony Murray, Reginald Robertson and Jaryd Payne are now speaking louder than ever from their graves. The video footage of the missing escape hatch and floating water drum, with its chilling suggestion that at least one of them was clinging to the yacht after the storm, brings two new issues into focus.

First is the possibility, as per Makendlana’s “disputed” email to LeFevre of 13 March 2015, that the frauds are still ongoing. According to John Titterton, whose experience with TUI Marine in South Africa stretches back to 2009, the email speaks for itself.

“The yachts being shipped to Europe and the Caribbean may even today not be equipped with full safety equipment and registered EPIRBs,” he told the Daily Maverick. “There may be no life rafts, and the skipper’s name may be falsified.”

Why is this important? Because the non-South African delivery skippers at the ports on the other end need temporary passes in order to sail these yachts onto TUI Marine’s charter operations, and the passes are issued by SAMSA under the South African flag—if any of them hit trouble, they could meet the same fate as Moorings A5130.

The second new issue is the question of TUI’s liability. “One the one hand there is the settlement,” said Trevor Payne, referring to the amount the company has offered the families to make it all disappear. “But this other thing we are talking about now is criminal. We don’t want to just walk away. TUI need to be brought to task, especially John LeFevre.”

If the world’s largest tourism and leisure conglomerate does ever land up in court, they’ll have mountains of damning evidence to contend with. And if their game is simply to wait for the families to run out of money or stamina or heart, they’d be well advised to remember Lynne Morgan. At what point do human beings stop seeking justice for their beloved dead? Sometimes, the answer is never. DM

Main photo: The lost mariners – Anthony Murray, Reginald “Reg” Robertson, Jaryd Payne.

Read more:

  • Bigger than the Weather, by Kevin Bloom in Daily Maverick.
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