Former R700 000-a-year Netcare senior manager James Gregory, whose charges of criminal fraud against the JSE-listed healthcare group were published in Noseweek last year, now claims it was all a pack of lies. Our story, headlined “Gimme!” was run over four pages. Gregory,  who refers to his previous employer as “Notcare” or “Netscare”, was over the moon. “It’s marvellous! 100% accurate! You’ve helped me find closure!” he enthused.

And why the change of heart now? What is the US Government to make of this bizarre business? 

On 14 November the High Court granted an interim interdict in favour of pharmaceutical giant Bayer, preventing the generic manufacturer Pharma Dynamics from selling an oral contraceptive called Ruby. Big pharma is using South Africa's weak intellectual property laws to inject extra life into its drugs monopoly. And we see that healthcare regulations benefit monopolies, rather than the public.

Conveyancing – the transferring of property ownership on the Deeds Office Register (which is not exactly rocket science and could be handled by a variety of people) is reserved exclusively for attorneys, many of whom depend on conveyancing to put food on the table (prosciutto, not pap, of course). Attorneys on bank panels must turn down instructions to act against banks. So how did lawyers allow themselves to be sold into servitude?

The Roman satirist Juvenal, who wrote 2 000 years ago, is still the source of some timely maxims. On the question of who can be trusted with power, for example: “Who guards the guardians?” And his observation that the “common people”, rather than caring about their freedom, are only interested in “bread and circuses”.

If 65-year old Peter Tennant had applied Juvenal’s investigative skills he might not now be at war with World Travel International.

Sweet charity turns into a bitter letdown as money promised for abused children shelter disappeared. A local enterprise known as the Fair Trade Trading Post in Irene boasted in an advertorial that they were “making the community a cleaner and greener place to be” and when asked about the missing money, Tania Bryant - one of the directors said that she'd decided to "re-route that money" and then she sold the company for "an undisclosed amount".

Not so long ago, amidst a deluge of disciplinary hearings and suspensions, it looked like curtains for general manager of Retail Channels, Paul Newman and his guys – after they were discovered to be running an exclusive internet porn ring from their desks at MTN headquarters. It’s a skeleton in the cupboard of the JSE-listed group (chairman Cyril Ramaphosa) that’s been kept well buried until now. In fact, group managing director Karel Pienaar refuses to confirm or deny that such a thing ever happened.

John Block, the notorious ANC leader in the Northern Cape, seems to have been instrumental in making life difficult for the official (Jerry Mndaweni) who sanctioned his illegal mining of a state-owned salt mine, using a fraudulent permit.

Readers may recall Noseweek’s  story about Michael Fenner-Solomon, aka Mr Constantia, who was putting up a luxury development in Constantia called Warbler’s Grove. He was struggling to unload the eight R20-million-plus units he had built and as creditors began to hound him, he would warn them off with the message: “I am Mr Constantia; cross me and I’ll make sure you never work in the area again.”

Asim Qaiser was a star employee of asset managers Oasis Group Holdings. By all accounts, the quietly spoken 36-year-old Pakistani national is something of a tough cat: he survived four-and-a-half years at Oasis, from 2006 until 30 June 2010. When he started, it was a material condition of his employment that he would join the Oasis Crescent Retirement Fund. Now a court battle looms as brothers Ebrahim cling to his provident funds.