A prolific housing contractor was awarded a suspect emergency tender during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite having its bank accounts frozen (and then seized) by authorities for allegedly controlling a vast money laundering network.

In the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, the South African government went large on emergency contracts for everything from masks and hand sanitiser to makeshift housing and hospital beds.

The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) was later tasked with sifting through thousands of contracts to find irregular, unlawful or fraudulent deals. It found thousands, which it summarised in a doorstopper December 2021 final report to the President.

One case from the Eastern Cape Human Settlements Department (ECHSD) was a R126-million deal for the provision of 1,800 temporary shelters for residents of dense, overcrowded informal settlements where the risk of infection was amplified.

More important for this story, however, is one of the companies winning a quarter of this ill-fated contract: a prolific government housing contractor named Takela Group.

It appears that housing projects are not Takela's only, or even main line of business.

Evidence gathered by amaBhungane, as well as through an extensive Reserve Bank investigation, places the company and its owner, one Ke Tang, at the centre of more than one large-scale scheme to illegally move hundreds of millions of rands offshore.

As we will show, these schemes...