The Grand Scam !

From 2005 to 2009, the heir to one of South Africa’s blue-blood families methodically constructed
the largest-ever con in South African history. Barry Tannenbaum, the grandson of the founder of
one of the country’s biggest pharmaceutical fi rms, Adcock Ingram, offered investors stratospheric
returns of more than 200 per cent a year by investing in the components used to make AIDS drugs. It
was nothing more than a lie, which suckered the country’s business elite, including the former CEO
of Pick n Pay, the one-time head of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the ex-boss of OK Bazaars.
After the bubble popped in June 2009, fi nance minister Pravin Gordhan announced that hundreds
of investors in South Africa, Australia and Europe had ploughed more than R12.5 billion into
Tannenbaum’s scheme, based on the empty promise of immense riches. Dwarfi ng the Brett Kebble
rip-off, Fidentia and the Krion pyramid scheme, it proved to be the most embarrassing fi nancial
disaster in the country’s history, and it exposed holes in a banking and fi nancial system billed as one
of the safest in the world.
For Tannenbaum’s victims, the nightmare continued after the scheme collapsed, as liquidators,
tax offi cials and criminal investigators demanded their pound of fl esh. But Tannenbaum, now at
large on Australia’s Gold Coast, continues to live as if nothing happened, working for an Australian
insurance company.
The question that hasn’t been answered until now is, how did Tannenbaum swindle so many
people with such ease? And, more crucially, why did he do it? Through extensive interviews with his
family, friends and numerous ‘investors’, this book provides the startling answers to those questions.
For the fi rst time, the real motivation that fueled South Africa’s Bernie Madoff is laid bare.

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