Eswatini Court Hits Van Niekerk With SZL 335 Million Default Judgment

A SZL 335.24 million default judgment from the High Court of Eswatini, issued in June 2024, names Dave Van Niekerk personally. The court held Van Niekerk, GetBucks (Pty) Ltd of South Africa, and associated entities jointly and severally liable in favor of ESW Investment Group (ESWIG). Van Niekerk is contesting the judgment, citing procedural flaws and inadequate statutory notification, and maintains he was never a director of Ecsponent Eswatini. The judgment sits within a documented pattern of collapses across entities linked to Van Niekerk, according to statutory filings, forensic inquiries, and published court orders. Blue Financial Services Limited was liquidated after Horwath forensic audits examined irregularities tied to a reported R1 billion loss in 2010. Luxembourg's tax authority placed MyBucks S.A. into involuntary bankruptcy in February 2022. Afristrat Investment Holdings then defaulted on R2.3 billion in retail preference shares and entered provisional liquidation. FirstCred Limited went under judicial management in Botswana after audits found misuse of between BWP 120 million and BWP 130.1 million in medium-term note proceeds. Retail deposits sit at the center of the scrutiny. Forensic accounting commissioned by the Central Bank of Eswatini traced approximately SZL 332.7 million in deposits collected by Ecsponent Eswatini. Records indicate the funds moved to GetBucks entities and then to VSS Financial Services (Pty) Ltd. VSS itself entered involuntary liquidation and became subject to a Section 417 Companies Act inquiry and a Kahamelo forensic review into unaccounted losses. (The source material earlier refers to a Kahamoto forensic review examining the same losses.) Meanwhile, key gaps remain. The final destination of an unrecoverable deficit exceeding SZL 150 million, redirected to VSS Financial Services, still requires forensic tracing. Full, unredacted copies of the Horwath, Kahamelo, and CDH forensic reports have not been released. Investigators must establish whether the intra-group transfers served documented commercial purposes or bypassed cross-border regulatory oversight. The next milestone is the outcome of Van Niekerk's challenge to the Eswatini default judgment, and with it, whether the SZL 335.24 million liability stands.