The “dark PR” origins of a Facebook troll called “Mia Taylor”

Mia Taylor, no profile, no picture, no friends, appeared on a number of Facebook platforms related to Cape Town’s water crisis at the height of the great drought in 2018. She spoke with the authority of someone with high-level insider knowledge of the City of Cape Town’s water and sanitation department, but was not always truthful.

“I knew that going back to Defence Intelligence was going to set me on a collision course with those hell bent on embezzling state funds.” – Maj Gen Sandile Sizani, Chief Director Counter Intelligence (ret) SANDF, in his submission to the Zondo Commission.

A meaningful punishment for a major financial crime?

In October, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a landmark settlement with banking giant Goldman Sachs over its participation in a bribery scheme that syphoned hundreds of millions from Malaysian public coffers. The bank agreed to pay nearly $3 billion to authorities in multiple countries, and agreed to have its Malaysian subsidiary plead guilty in a Brooklyn (New York) court to conspiring to violate U.S. bribery laws.

Dear Reader, meet Baroness Gail Behr, artist, hotelier and creator of Cape Town’s hottest new hotel, Dorp...

"It’s not a hotel, nor a house, nor a pub. It is, instead, a kind of oddballs club.”

Baroness Gail Behr is reading me a poem she wrote recently about the hotel she built from scratch high on the slopes of Signal Hill, above the old Malay Quarter. She intends putting the poem on her website so that guests know what they’re coming to.

“You’ll know if you fit the moment you arrive. And if you don’t, simply reverse down the drive,” she continues with her poem, as a Chopin piano piece plays in the background. We are sitting in the airy plant- and antique-filled parlour of the Dorp hotel. In the background is the splutter of a coffee machine coming from the hotel’s bistro, christened Café Covid by Behr.

The saga involving Spar and the Giannacopoulos family continues. The family now plans to seek redress for their grievances through legal action against the Spar board and to declare three of Spar’s executives delinquent directors in terms of the Companies Act.

Billionaire businesswoman Isabel dos Santos has stepped down from the board of Angola’s flagship mobile phone operator Unitel, citing “a climate of permanent conflict” among the company’s directors.

Laughter and Forgetting

There’s a weird vibe in the air in NYC. Kinda like the pandemic is ‘old news’. A big ‘pandemic, yawn’. Or, ‘oh yeah, the pandemic, is that still happening?’ People are over it. Pandemicked out. And New York is slowly re-awakening too. The florist, the liquor store and the coffee shop across the street have all re-opened. And most restaurants in my hood are all doing take-out and delivery. There are definitely a lot more people on the streets and in the park. And I haven’t heard an ambulance siren in quite some time. Thank God. Only 48 people died in New York in the last 24hrs. And all hospitals are reporting manageable admissions.

Samson used to arrive at my gate after dark, drunk and belligerent. “Veevjaan!” he shouted, “Maak oop!” The bastard, I’d told him a hundred times to go and sleep under the bridge with the other hobos. “Veevjaaan ... Veevjaan!!!!” he bellowed. I unlocked the gate as quickly and quietly as possible. The ordeal was just over quicker that way. “Shut up, Samson, you’ll wake my sister...”