Peter Hain has been fighting for justice in South Africa all his life. More than any single person I can think of, he made the Afrikaner nationalists who brought us apartheid the most miserable. He effectively stopped Springbok rugby and cricket teams from competing abroad.
His activism led him into the British Labour Party, where he was a cabinet minister three times - for Northern Ireland, work and pensions, and for Wales. He was leader of the House of Commons from 2003 to 2005, responsible for arranging government business in the UK parliament.
In 2015 he was elevated to the House of Lords, with a life peerage. From his wild days in the UK anti-apartheid movement he has become a distinguished and respected figure in British public life.
Which is why his involvement in combating state capture in South Africa is so significant. Britain is not merely our old colonial tormentor. London remains the pre-eminent centre of international finance, Brexit notwithstanding. UK banks have unmatched global reach and influence.
Hain is a frequent visitor to South Africa. Recently he has been lecturing at the Wits Business School and has seen for himself the effects of the state capture project concocted by President Jacob Zuma and the Gupta family. Speaking in the House of Lords last week, he detailed the money-laundering project at the fake dairy farm in Vrede in the Free State, money for which was taken out of the country, only to return to pay for a Gupta family wedding at Sun City in 2013.
It was powerful stuff. In letters to the government he named two British banks, Standard Chartered and HSBC, as having served as conduits for Gupta money laundering. He has given Britain's chancellor of the exchequer forensically detailed histories of Gupta transactions, and the UK fraud authorities are investigating.
It won't go away. At the same time SAP, the big German accounting firm that paid bribes to Gupta associates in South Africa to get a Transnet contract, has reported its behaviour to the US justice department and the FBI. Our rather slow Deputy Finance Minister Sfiso Buthelezi wondered out loud the other day why they would alert the Americans and not the South African Hawks!
He did not seem to appreciate that SAP has a secondary stock-market listing in New York and that by law it is required to report any criminal activity in the company to the US authorities. You can rest assured the FBI is on the case. Money from here has apparently also flowed to businesses in the US run by cousins of the Guptas. I would not want to be them.
Hain has also picked up on a curious line of possible corruption. Increasingly unable to use normal banking channels, the Guptas have, he suggests, gone into the scrap metals business. Why? Because you can buy, say, R1-million of scrap here and export it to Dubai. Someone there "buys" it for R1-million and hey presto you've suddenly moved your capital abroad without a bank.
It's perfect. Except that in South Africa you need a licence to export scrap metal. I remember someone telling me once that the Guptas were trying to screw a relative of theirs out of his aluminium scrap exporting licence to Dubai. It must have been three years ago.
I could kick myself now but I never followed it up. Fortunately Hain appears to have stumbled across much the same information. The export licences are in the gift of the Department of Trade and Industry, so if the Guptas have indeed been exporting legally, they've either succeeded in extracting licences from existing holders or they've been issued new ones by the department.
Either way, the issue brings Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies into the picture. For the sake of his own reputation he needs urgently to report transparently to parliament about the ownership of all scrap export licences over the past five years.
Sooner rather than later either the FBI or the UK fraud office is going to start issuing arrest warrants for the Guptas and their willing helpers in South Africa. What then happens is that Interpol issues a Red Notice in regard of the people nailed in what is a significant international money-laundering project.
Anyone named in a Red Notice faces arrest upon entry into the territory of any Interpol member. It obviously doesn't always work out that way, but it narrows your options in a meaningful way. Even in Dubai.
The Guptas may well find that the South Africa they've treated as their playground for nearly two decades becomes their prison instead. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
