What do Judge Willem Heath, columnist David Gleason and the ANC Youth League have in common? Answer: gratitude for Brett Kebble’s largess. All were among the more enthusiastic promoters of what wits are now calling South Africa’s Jacobite Rebellion.

Only a week before Jacob Zuma’s political demise, ex-judge Willem Heath (he’s now on Kebble’s payroll) issued a press statement in which he made a passionate defence of Zuma’s position. Gleason waxed similarly enthusiastic in his column in Business Day – so enthusiastic that he got himself fired. The boys in the ANC Youth League ranted and wore 100% Zuma T-shirts – and were not available to pose for our picture.

But, dear reader, you will notice there is another character in our cover illustration: SA Revenue Service Special Investigations chief Ivan Pillay. You don’t see him? He’s the plucked peacock sitting on Kebble’s lap. Without Pillay’s help, it could be said, Kebble might not have had the money to sponsor all the others as generously as he has done in recent years.

The simple explanation for Pillay’s inclusion is that since January 2002 he has presided over and seriously mismanaged an investigation of Kebble’s failure to render proper income tax returns for a decade – with the result that he has not paid any income tax since 1993. In May 2003 SARS investigators were telling their boss, Mr Pillay, that the revenue service would be perfectly entitled to issue an income tax assessment against the Kebbles for R50m! Instead, in June 2003 Pillay put a “temporary hold” on the investigation – and removed all the senior investigators off the project. Two years later still no assessment has been issued. By now he has so scrambled the investigation that he faces a legal nightmare should he wish to confront Kebble in court.

In recent years Mr Pillay has become famous in tax circles for his “settlement deals”, so that such a deal with Kebble and his father has been widely anticipated. The deals (rather like plea bargains) have become really popular amongst serious tax evaders: you agree to an assessment for a large sum (although nothing like as large as the amount of tax you should be paying) and, as part of the deal, agree to pay it off in monthly instalments. Mr Pillay proudly reports success, often in press statements - and then everyone, including Pillay and the taxpayer, simply forgets about it all – including those instalment payments, that is. We shall be reporting on a number of such cases in due course.

Even in terms of the “simple” explanation, Pillay should immediately be fired for gross incompetence (or worse).

There could, of course, be another explanation for Mr Pillay’s poor performance. The headline of our story, published way back in November 2001, told it all: “Thabo’s Boys vs Vula’s Boys”.

It told how those within the ANC with interests in the arms deals could be divided roughly into two competing groups.

And that the difference between them could just influence who would be sacrificed and who would be saved in the arms-deal investigations.

In the 1980s, then-ANC intelligence boss Jacob Zuma recruited the Shaik brothers to his network; Mac Maharaj headed the intelligence wing’s most famous assignment, Operation Vula. The Vula Boys are the collection of communists and (mostly KwaZulu-Natal) ANC intelligence operatives who set up the secret pre-1990 programme to develop the leadership and financial networks inside SA needed to launch a violent revolution. Ivan Pillay was a senior Vula operative.

Vula was controversial because it was secret even inside the ANC: the wider ANC leadership – including Thabo Mbeki – knew nothing about it. That trust gap between the groups appears to have persisted.

The Vula operatives included Siphiwe Nyanda (former defence force chief), Ronnie Kasrils (moved by Mbeki from defence to water affairs), Mo Shaik (demoted from national intelligence co-ordinator to ambassador in Morocco), and Shaik’s brother Schabir (who, recent events suggest, lost the protection he once might have expected). Until his sacking, Jacob Zuma was widely seen as the closest the group had to a protector in government.

Operation Vula set itself up in opposition to another initiative within the ANC, the Mbeki-led efforts at dialogue with the apartheid state.

In the midst of negotiations, Mbeki was confronted by the Nationalist Party negotiators with evidence of a secret ANC unit, Vula, of which he had been unaware. FW de Klerk sanctimoniously charged the ANC with secretly plotting insurrection while negotiating a settlement.

Some sources believe Mbeki was so angry that, in effect, he allowed the Vula network to be hung out to dry. Maharaj and others were arrested and released on bail only after the Pretoria agreement with De Klerk had already been signed. Mandela, ever the conciliator, welcomed them into his cabinet. Mbeki was less forgiving.

(Earlier in 2001 we had reported on a group called Congress Consultants that had been formed in the early 1990s as a kind of guerrilla intelligence network to give Thabo Mbeki independent intelligence on what was happening in the country and in his rivals’ camps. It ensured that Mbeki was well informed about the activities of his opponents and their allies – and many were subsequently sidelined, among them Mac Maharaj, Pravin Gordhan and Jay Naidoo.)

Where are the Vula Boys now? They are positioned strategically throughout state structures. The Shaik brothers’ mentor, that stalwart communist academic Pravin Gordhan, like Maharaj, was unlikely to be welcomed into Mbeki’s political structures; instead he heads the SA Revenue Service, where he has been joined by old comrades Vuso Shabalala (customs), Ivan Pillay (special investigations) and Sirish Soni. (We shall have more to report about Soni, too, in due course.)

There are clearly ideological issues involved in the conflict. Maharaj, Gordhan and company were associated with the ANC’s left wing. At least two of the Shaik brothers have privately expressed concern at the “crude Africanism” espoused by some of Mbeki’s acolytes.

noseweek reported in 2001 that, in the course of their arms-deal inquiry, the Scorpions were taking an interest in the relationship between Maharaj, Gordhan, Zuma and the Shaiks.

We now know that they have in fact investigated Maharaj, Zuma and the Shaiks – but what of Gordhan? And why would they have been investigating him?

We do know, thanks to Rapport, that, at the request of Shaik, SARS Commissioner Gordhan solved a tax problem for the billionaire AM Moola group. This personal service, explained a spokesman for SARS, was part of Revenue’s open-door policy. But then Rapport also told us that Gordhan’s brother-in-law worked for Schabir Shaik – and we know that Shaik’s father-in-law, Ahmed Vahed, was an AM Moola director. Maybe all that tells us is that the relationships have remained close.

So, back to Mr Kebble and SARS: is the revenue service’s failure to tax Mr Kebble due to the proverbial cock-up factor, bribery and corruption - or is it simply a quid pro quo for his support of the Vula Boys?

With acknowledgement to noseweek.