SA entrepreneur André Pienaar accused of ‘acting improperly to rig’ $10bn contract for Amazon

South African André Pienaar, an international security entrepreneur, has been accused in a US court of “participating in an influence-peddling scheme” to try to help the Amazon corporation win a $10-billion contract to provide cloud computer services to the US Department of Defense (DoD).

The claim was made by Kenneth Glueck, executive vice-president of the technology company Oracle Corporation, who is suing Pienaar and the Washington lobbyist and public relations consultant Juleanna Glover for defamation and related claims in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

According to Glueck’s claim for damages, “Complaint for Defamation, False Light Invasion of Privacy and Civil Conspiracy”, which he submitted to the court in August, Pienaar and Glover defamed him by telling senior Washington journalists last year that Glueck had lied about Pienaar in PowerPoint presentations he showed to US law enforcement and congressional oversight committees from 2018.

In his affidavit, Glueck alleged that “illicit measures and influence” were used by Pienaar and others to try to secure “a $10-billion, 10-year monopoly on DoD cloud computing”.

Glueck is claiming damages in an amount to be determined by the court.

The Jedi contract

Pienaar was born in South Africa but, according to Glover’s affidavit, is now also a UK citizen and sometimes lives in the US. He is the founder and CEO of C5 Capital (“C5”), a venture capital and private equity company.

He describes himself as a cybersecurity, space and energy expert and investor. He began his career at Kroll Inc, the US multinational financial and risk advisory firm.

While at Kroll, he was a strategist for SA’s Directorate of Special Operations, also known as the Scorpions.

In 2004, he founded G3, a risk and cybersecurity advisory firm. He also owns National Security News, which takes a conservative view of South African political issues.

In his claim, Glueck alleged that in 2017, 2018 and 2022, Pienaar progressively purchased the company SBD Advisors from its founder and owner, Washington lobbyist and insider Sally B Donnelly.

Donnelly was required to divest from SBD when she accepted a job as senior adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in January 2017 (the start of the first Trump administration). That was because Donnelly’s firm, at the time, was lobbying on behalf of Amazon for DoD cloud computing contracts.

However, Glueck claimed that Donnelly had not fully divested from SBD Advisors when she took up the DoD job.

He cited records of evidence given by Donnelly at the time, in which she was vague about the details of the sale, including the identity of the purchaser.

Glueck said it was only years later that it emerged that she had sold SBD to VMAP Investors — a company owned by Pienaar — in four instalments, totalling $1.56-million.

Once inside the DoD, Donnelly was involved in initiating the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (“Jedi”), a cloud procurement contract worth about $10-billion over 10 years and a monopoly, as the contract would not be put out to tender, said Glueck.

Donnelly “aggressively and improperly advocated for her former firm’s client, Amazon, to receive the sole-source contract” for the Jedi, claimed Glueck.

Accusations of lying

Glueck alleged that Pienaar’s C5 was a commercial partner of Amazon and a paying client of Donnelly’s SBD Advisors at this time.

“Securing a 10-year cloud computing monopoly at DoD was obviously important for Amazon. For many years prior to 2017, Donnelly and Pienaar acted on behalf of Amazon to tout its cloud services to governments around the world.”

Glueck claimed that Pienaar later denied buying Donnelly’s firm, and also denied that he had previously contracted with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help it win cloud computing contracts with the DoD and other entities.

He cited an interview Pienaar gave to The Cube in December 2018 in which he said: “I didn’t buy Sally Donnelly’s business.”

But, Glueck alleged, Pienaar did buy the business, adding that if it had been known in 2017 that a C5-related entity (controlled/owned by Pienaar) had purchased SBD, “Donnelly would have faced additional recusal scrutiny because C5 was a commercial partner of Amazon.

“With those facts in hand … [the DoD Standards of Conduct Office] would have forced Donnelly to recuse from technology matters related to Amazon.”

Glueck said that at the October 2024 press briefing, Pienaar said his company C5 played no role anywhere in the world in selling Amazon’s AWS cloud services to governments or private entities.

This was untrue, alleged Glueck, because “C5 and AWS co-branding was ubiquitous at AWS conferences”.

Glueck also quotes an email which Pienaar purportedly wrote to Amazon staffers in August 2016 about a roadshow which C5 and Amazon planned to undertake “to help drive AWS public sector cloud adoption by engaging opinion makers, governments and multilateral organisations”.

Overall, Glueck said, he had compiled his PowerPoint presentations from public records, whistleblowers and other sources to document “a corrupt influence peddling scheme … a catalog of government corruption involving Donnelly, Pienaar, and Amazon, all of whom used illicit measures and influence in their efforts to secure a $10 billion, 10-year monopoly on DoD cloud computing”.

Glueck said that after a dispute between Amazon and Microsoft over Jedi, the DoD aborted the programme and replaced it with a cloud computing service that was shared among Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

Alleged defamation  

Glueck launched his defamation claim against Pienaar and the lobbyist Glover largely on what the two said about Glueck at a private press briefing for top Washington journalists in Glover’s house in October 2024.

He said they had defamed him by telling the journalists that he had lied about Pienaar and used fake documents in a series of PowerPoint presentations he had made to law enforcement and Congress years before about Pienaar’s, Donnelly’s and Amazon’s involvement in the $10-billion Jedi contract.

Glueck said he believed Pienaar had tried to discredit Glueck’s presentations because he needed an alternative narrative to the “IronNet debacle”.

He noted that the Associated Press had just published a story by investigative journalist Alan Suderman detailing how Pienaar’s high-profile security startup IronNet “went public in 2021, reached a market valuation of $3 billion, and two years later was bankrupt, leaving investors, lenders, and employees in its wake”.

The AP story included testimony of Pienaar’s former business associates, including Mark Berly, a former IronNet vice-president who said: “I’m honestly ashamed that I was ever an executive at that company”, and that “the company’s top leaders cultivated a culture of deceit…”

Glueck said that Pienaar had denied in the AP article that IronNet had failed and that he had injected about $60-million of C5 capital to keep IronNet afloat.

Glueck said that at the October 2024 press briefing, Glover had said: “The AP article was purely a vehicle to run the dossier (the PowerPoint presentation) on André. That’s all that article was.”

Pienaar and Glover told the assembled journalists that Glueck’s PowerPoint presentation, copies of which they handed out, was “based on documents that are fraudulent”, Glueck said, even though he had nothing to do with the article and was not mentioned in it.

“Pienaar and Glover proceeded to deliver to the assembled journalists a defamatory rant about Glueck while detouring into a fantastical, largely fictional, autobiography of Pienaar,” Glueck claimed.

He alleged that this included Pienaar claiming that Nelson Mandela had been one of his clients, that he had been an adviser to King Charles, and that he had helped the US Drug Enforcement Agency capture the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Glueck said Pienaar had also blamed him for planting the idea in the AP article that Pienaar had a long-standing relationship with the sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

Glueck pointed out that it was actually William Lofgren, a former CIA officer and co-founder with Pienaar of the G3 consultancy, who told AP, “Pienaar also worked at the time to help Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg cement relationships with London’s rich and famous.”

Glueck said that at the October 2024 media briefing, Pienaar had denied having served as a director of United Manganese of Kalahari (UMK), a South African mining company, of which Vekselberg’s Renova Group was a large shareholder.

Glueck pointed out that Pienaar had previously admitted to serving as a director of UMK for about a year, in an interview with The Cube. (Incidentally, the ANC’s investment company, Chancellor House, is also a large shareholder in UMK.)

In summary, Glueck argued in his claim that in his PowerPoint presentations, he “presented significant and credible evidence that Pienaar was a participant in an influence peddling scheme, and that Donnelly and others acted improperly to rig an enormous DoD contract for Amazon”.

The court gave Pienaar and Glover 21 days to respond to Glueck’s complaint. Daily Maverick will publish an article about their responses. DM