After the Bell: Lucky Montana — fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…

One of the most interesting games I play when I meet someone, or just watch from afar as someone gets involved in a public soap opera, is to ask myself: How did they make their money?

It’s a slightly guilty pleasure. I mean, how you make your money is none of my business. 

I was so relieved a couple of years ago when a friend who had emigrated from Joburg to Somerset West told my wife and me that “How do they make their money?” was his and his wife’s favourite game too.

Sometimes it’s probably obvious – you know that a person works for a particular company, or does a particular job, and you can see how they live as a result. If they’re a banker or a lawyer or a foreign correspondent for the BBC, I almost expect them to be in Saxonwold or Parktown. If they work in online gambling, the three acres in Parktown North explains itself.

What makes this game so much fun is that you have to remember that you are usually trying to assess how at least two different people have made their money, and you have no way of knowing what their forms of income might be.

In some cases, someone has done very well in one business and sold it, and what they do now is completely different, and doesn’t really add that much to their lifestyle. Or there might be some family money somewhere.

Two of the best people I know have a wonderful fireplace that fits beautifully in their home and was paid for through some luck in the national lottery (I’m not making it up).

But some other people, we guess, got it corruptly.

I’ve always known that Lucky Montana was one of them.

The first signal was that Pieter-Louis Myburgh was reporting on him. Then came the Zondo Commission and all that followed about Prasa. And I still haven’t forgiven him for lying to me that day on The Midday Report when he claimed that the new locomotives were perfect for our railways.

As we all found out later, they were too tall, and the Prasa “expert” who proclaimed them good to go had lied about his PhD. That little comedy came at a cost to us of more than R2-billion.

So, I have a lot of interest in how Montana got his money. And what he’s doing with it now that he’s an MK MP.

SARS has now, almost uniquely, shed some light on this. At the weekend they did something they’ve hardly ever done before, and held a press conference about one individual’s tax affairs. What allowed them to speak about Montana was a provision in the law that says that while SARS cannot disclose an individual’s affairs, it can do so if that individual lies in public about their tax.

Basically, if someone like Julius Malema says in public that he has no dispute with SARS, and in fact is in a dispute with SARS, they can say so in public.

Wonderfully, the law also says they have to give that person 24 hours’ notice before they do it.

I do wonder how they do it. Does someone have to ring up Malema or Montana and tell them? Imagine getting this SMS: “Dear non-Taxpayer. SARS has noted your public disclosure of falsehoods about your tax affairs. Therefore SARS will, tomorrow, Saturday, 12 October 2025, publicly disclose the true state of affairs. Kind regards. SARS.”

I do think that this has come at a very good time for the revenue service.

The current commissioner, Edward Kieswetter, has made big promises about increasing the tax take, the money due to the government.

We all know that the illicit economy is huge. More than half the cigarettes in this country are sold illegally. Anger at crime and those who benefit from it is growing. And, as anyone can see from watching any of the policing inquiries for two minutes, our police are in a mess.

This means that SARS now stands virtually alone, as it has in the past, against the tide of criminality that sometimes feels it is about to overwhelm us.

While I don’t think the officials at SARS saw it like this when they were making decisions about Montana (they seem so obviously correct on the law), I still think this is useful for them.

The Montana case could serve as a signal to everyone else that they are going to get tougher on wrongdoing. It says to everyone in society that they are coming for you.

I wonder whether some people currently embroiled in disputes with SARS might suddenly choose to settle those disputes this week because they suddenly realise the full consequences if they go down the wrong road.

Montana, of course, has given his own view of what happened, and says that SARS has lied. He claims he is willing to be a “sacrifice” to prove a point about SARS.

Mr Montana, sir, the last time I believed you it cost the nation R2-billion. I’m going to find it difficult to trust you again.

In the meantime, I intend to continue to ask myself (and Pieter-Louis) how you got your money. DM