By Tina Weavind From Business Day Live

Belvedere is a confusing and murky tangle of offshore funds, but the most eyebrow raising is its Kijani fund, based in the Cayman Islands.

The Kijani fund was started in 2011, and appears to have been a cracking success, producing a nearly perfect 90° return trajectory. It is almost too good to be true. There is, as yet, no conclusive evidence of a Ponzi scam, but it is a clear red flag. The $130m (about R1.56bn) Kijani Commodity Fund — a subfund of Belvedere’s Mauritian Four Elements fund — produced an astonishing 44.18% return in 2011 when it was launched, followed by 19.26% in 2012, 16.24% in 2013 and 21.44% last year.

But last October, the Mauritian authorities shut down Four Elements and another fund, Lancelot. Weeks later, Kijani and its nine subfunds skipped across the oceans to the Caymans. Investors were alerted to suspicious dealings when a related-party sale took place that involved a Stellenbosch farm. The farm’s value was bumped up more than 60%.

Cobus Kellermann claimed not to know much about this Stellenbosch land deal, and said he had nothing to do with it. “I wasn’t connected to it. It was handled by an offshore fund. I had no intricate knowledge of it,” he said.

Mr Kellermann claimed he was involved only in South African operations. He said he was also not directly connected to Kijani “to the best of my knowledge”.

But he said: “I could be a shareholder, I could be a shareholder of Microsoft and not know about it.”

Picture: SUNDAY TIMES

For more on this story go to: http://www.bdlive.co.za/businesstimes/2015/03/29/suspicious-fund-skips-mauritius-for-the-caymans