In December 2023, Shumani Lawrence Mulaudzi signed a $1.2-billion (R20-billion) deal with state-owned PetroSA, appointing his company Equator Holdings to fund and build pipelines and other infrastructure for a future gas industry.
Four months later though, Equator was liquidated for failing to pay a R725 000 debt to a First Division soccer player.
“This discovery,” he later told the Johannesburg High Court, “shocked me considerably”.
The liquidation application had been granted without his knowledge, he claimed, and against the wrong company. And the sheriff who was supposed to serve the papers on him had instead left them stapled to the gates of a construction site that had once been his home…