The UN and Canadian company Bombardier have rubbished two of the boasts Pretoria law professor Frans Whelpton is making to try to recruit business partners for Swazi projects worth billions of dollars.
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) has denied a claim by the former Unisa academic that it paid him at least $40m to record the customary law of eSwatini, and Bombardier - which makes aircraft and trains - said a supposed donation of £260m (R4.5bn today) for "social upliftment" in the kingdom was a figment of his imagination.
Whelpton is also said to have sent potential investors letters, supposedly signed by former Swazi cabinet ministers, the authenticity of which has now been questioned.
Three people involved with his efforts over the past 20 years to sell get-rich-quick schemes have shown the Sunday Times letters and e-mails that they say created the impression Whelpton had control of billions of dollars lined up for projects in eSwatini.
One of the three, Francois Olivier, began a high court action in Pretoria in March to claim back R6m he says Whelpton has extracted from him on the basis of "fraud and misrepresentations" since 1998.
Olivier, former police fraud investigator Derick Furter and retired business person Ken van Zyl said Whelpton had told them the UNDP had promised him millions.
In 1998 the figure he was allegedly due to be paid was $40m, Olivier says, but by 2017 it had risen to $176m.
A UNDP spokesperson in New York said the agency had supported a customary law project, and Whelpton had been a technical adviser for it in 2006.
The UNDP did not say what it paid him, but noted that the agency spent $8m on all projects in eSwatini between 1996 and 2004. "It would be incorrect to say that any one project in Swaziland could total $40m."
Another claim that Olivier and Furter say Whelpton made was that he had facilitated a donation of £260m for eSwatini from Bombardier, which was in an account in Geneva.
But Simon Letendre, a spokesperson for the company, said: "Bombardier was never involved in the project … We have no business activities in Swaziland and no relationship with Mr Whelpton."
The Sunday Times has seen letters Whelpton passed to Van Zyl's business partners in 2014 when Whelpton was seeking R30m to pay his obligations from a legal case that two Pretoria doctors won against him.
Van Zyl's partners are directors of New Era Mining, a company that hopes to mine anthracite in eSwatini and that agreed to loan Whelpton the money. Several of the letters are addressed to Whelpton and apparently signed by Jabulile Mashwama, who was Swazi minister of natural resources & energy at the time.
One says: "We are grateful for the offer of New Era Mining to acquire the claim of the doctors against you."
Asked about the letters, Mashwama said: "There is not a single letter I signed to the said professor … I have never met nor written any letters to this gentleman."
Another letter to Whelpton, purportedly signed by Mashwama's predecessor, Princess Tsandzile Dlamini, bears the subject line "Mining licence: New Era Mining Proprietary Limited". It says: "I herewith acknowledge receipt of R22m, being the final payment of R100m for the above-mentioned licence."
Dlamini told the Sunday Times: "I did not sign any such letter and the content is false."
Asked to comment, Whelpton proposed the Sunday Times meet him and his lawyer next month.
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