MARTIN WELZ - NOSEWEEK'S TAKE A LOT SCROOGE

Dear Noseweek Readers,

          As Noseweek magazine might tell you this is “News you’re not supposed to know”.

          What’s more it’s so hot I can assure you it will never appear in Martin’s publication, which he founded 25 years ago as South Africa’s only investigative magazine.

          As a former Sunday Times investigative journalist, turned self employed Private Eye, I have had a hard hitting blog for nearly 10 years to keep me off the streets in my retirement. From time to time I gave Martin some of the exposés that have appeared in it. He used them, sometimes crediting only my Dearjon-letter blog, while on other occasions my name was mentioned as well. An article I wrote specifically for Noseweek had my byline on it.

          Knowing full well that I was a pensioner he never once suggested paying me and nor did he ever offer to give me a free copy of the Noseweek edition in which my contributions appeared.         

          It was one way traffic. My blog is not a money making exercise. On the other hand Noseweek must be, otherwise it would not have survived for so long. Bad habits die hard. I just write for fun.

          As recently as a few weeks ago Martin phoned me to ask if he could use the story I broke in 2016 about the Cape Town doctor who ripped off his elderly, terminally ill patients. I agreed and even passed on two pictures I got for my post headed Caring doctor who cashed cheques for his elderly patients.

          The Health cheques for GP report in the February 2019 edition of Martin’s monthly magazine took up two pages with a large section of my post used almost word for word in most of it. I must concede it did credit me and my blog as the originator of this scoop.

          In January this year I published a book entitled Dearjon Exposed. It contains what I believe are some of the best posts from my blog. As Noseweek features in several of the posts as well as in the blurb on the back of the cover I thought I would get Martin to give the book a plug.

          Although his magazine is never much more than 30 pages it does devote one page to Books.

          When I gave him a brief run down about my book on the phone he told me to bring it to him. After driving a considerable distance from my home I handed it to him in his Cape Town office. Impatiently he said he was too busy to discuss it then and that I should phone him in a day or two. “Then we’ll talk,” he added.

          “Then we’ll talk” became his mantra for several weeks after that as he was always too busy to discuss my book. He kept putting me off, but at no stage did he have the courage to say anything like, “That’s not the kind of book we would write about in my magazine.”

          He kept me on the hook like a fisherman enjoying the torment.

          It ended on a Monday or Tuesday I think it was. He was initially not available when I phoned in the morning so I sent him an email. In it I asked when we were going to have this “talk” about whether or not he was going to give my book a plug. I referred to the unpaid writing I had done for Noseweek and complained that he was often not available when I phoned, but he never phoned me back when I left messages.

          Later that day I did get hold of him on the phone. He sounded angry and again told me to phone him on another day when “We’ll talk.” After I told him I had sent him an email he said he would have a look at it. In all my dealings with him he has seldom, if ever, replied to any of my emails.

          I never heard from him again.

          This tale had quite a few similarities to the way Lynne Johns, the news editor of the Cape Times behaved when I gave this Dr van Rooyen exclusive of mine to her paper in 2016. It was used as a front page lead without any reference to me or my blog.

          Johns and other members of that paper’s staff lied to me repeated. Much like Welz did over my book they kept leading me on by repeatedly undertaking to credit me as the originator of this story. Many lies later neither my name nor my blog had been mentioned anywhere in the Cape Times.

          Having taken on dubious business leaders and crooks of all kinds over the years you would have thought that Martin’s ethics would be of a higher calibre than to play this dishonest game of pretend.  He created the illusion that he was considering promoting my book when, as it turned out, this was never, ever his intention.

          My guess is that he probably didn’t even open it.

          Well Martin a.k.a *Ebenezer this is my side of that “talk” that you actually lied about because, in spite of numerous undertakings, it never took place. There’s one consolation: I certainly won’t be out of pocket if my exposés don’t ever appear in Noseweek again.

          Regards,

          Jon, a disgusted contributor, who has learnt a valuable lesson. No doubt this was “News you are not supposed to know,” but you sure know it now.

*Ebeneza Scrooge was made famous by Charles Dickens in his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. His last name has become synonymous in the English language with a person who is very tight fisted with their money.

P.S. It is very short sighted of the news media and editors like Martin Welz to treat people like me the way he did. In this tech age everybody is a reporter on social media and on blogs that are all over the place, so this makes it harder than ever for the likes of Noseweek to get exclusive scoops. He should therefore nurture anybody who is prepared to pass on good tips or in my case actually write the entire story with an investigative background. Ironically he was prepared to sacrifice a relationship that goes back years because he would not promote a book that actually includes quite a few puffs for his own magazine - Noseweek.   

See also: Rip-off doctor and Newspaper's lies    

     

MEDIA EMPIRE CHIEF ANDREW BONAMOUR'S STARTLING ALLEGATIONS IN DEFENCE OF HIS FLAGSHIP PAPER THE SUNDAY TIMES

Dear Newspaper Readers,

Andrew Bonamour CEO of Tiso
Blackstar Group

          Being in the business of cornering shysters and highlighting inefficiencies would surely have taught the Sunday Times that coming clean was always the best way to defuse any situation.

          But when it had its own back to the wall about employing a crooked journalist it showed it has learnt nothing from its exposés or what it advocates for others.

          Apologising was not in its vocabulary.

          This was disturbingly illustrated after my post: Exposed: The Sunday Times’ love affair with a crook (love affair) was published on my blog on 10/9/2017.

          I pointed out how wrong it was that Jim Jones, the one time Editor of the Johannesburg based Business Day, had continued to be featured as a writer in the Sunday Times’ business section (Business Times) for eight years after he had been publicly exposed as a thief in a 2009 report in Noseweek, South Africa’s only investigate magazine.

          As if that was not bad enough Noseweek also revealed that he had abused his position as one of the paper’s freelances to get his own back by writing a scathing article about Moneyweb, an online financial publication. This was founded by Alec Hogg where Jones had been employed as its Mineweb Editor. Hogg was still there when the firm fired Jones after he stole the equivalent of R200 000 from it.

Bongani Siqoko

          On 21/9/2017 I asked the Sunday Times Editor Bongani Siqoko in an email if he was “big enough to tell me that Jim Jones will not write for the Sunday Times again.” But he wasn’t. I got a read report and nothing more.

          So I put the same question to Andrew Bonamour the Chief Executive of Tiso Blackstar (formerly Times Media) the Group that owns the Sunday Times. I told him I got no answer to my email from his Editor Bongani and gave him the link to my post.

          I added; “I accept that this happened before you took over as CEO (This was in 2012), but that should not stop you from healing the wound to some extent now, by giving me the undertaking that I have asked for.

          “How different in principle is this kind of behaviour by the Sunday Times to what KPMG and the like have been doing, even if it is on a smaller scale?”

          The replies I got were made even more peculiar by the fact that Andrew has been, or still is a director of a host of companies and his areas of expertise include investment banking and corporate finance. They were so odd that I wondered if perhaps they were the work of a hacker.

          Apart from this aspect his assertions had the same tone as the ones Jones displayed when he took Moneyweb apart. Bonamour’s ones however, did not even have a semblance of truth in them.

          “Are you sure you have the eighth(sic) person,” his email said. “*Jim Johns bea(sic) was former editor of BD. There is a *Jim Jones who is also a union leader.”

          Business Day is in the same Group as the Sunday Times so I would have expected Bonamour to have got his facts right about Jones’ tenure there. He also should have been aware of what happened to Jones when he was at Moneyweb, and if he didn’t know he could have easily found out.

          In a subsequent email he told me: “You(sic) wrong. Don’t just take Alec Hogg’s word for something.”

          “I’ve got the right person alright,” I replied. I included two attachments from Google that showed that Jones had been the Editor of Business Day and Noseweek had carried an article entitled: High on the Hog. How Jim Jones ripped off his website employer and then spun the story…… Former Business Day Editor Jim Jones.

          “If I had got it wrong,” I told him “I would have expected the Sunday Times Editor and the Business Times Editor to have corrected me by now.”

          Nothing I could do would get him to agree that his biggest selling paper had made a huge mistake in continuing to employ a known crook and that it would not be using him again.

          Having dismissed Hogg as a liar quite unjustifiably, he said something similar about Noseweek in his final email: “Noseweek is hardly a source. They write what they want.”

          So with the Sunday Times in the dock his pathetic defence was to just rubbish the prosecution regardless of the overwhelming evidence against his paper.

Alec Hogg

          Hogg, who is now the Editor and Publisher of BizNews, had this to say when I passed on Bonamour’s comments about him: “I never expected that from him. Sad.”

          He explained that the Moneyweb board had given Jones the chance to repay the money which he did. “I was against it and wanted to press charges but was overruled,” he stated. “They did agree that we would inform the SA Reserve Bank and tax authorities, which we did. I never heard anything more.

          “After he consulted his lawyers Jones’ defence was that I said he could inform our Canadian partners, Infomine, to divert money due to us into Jones’ Mauritius bank account.

          “Your concerns are valid but mud wrestling is an over-rated sport. There is nothing more powerful than the truth and it always wins in the end.

          “I moved on long ago.”

Today 1 October the Sunday Times explained exactly why its editor would not answer my question and why Bonamour was defending the use of Jim Jones even though he doesn’t seem to know who he is. 

Jim Jones

          Jones’ byline was on another Anglo American story on Page 6 of the Business Times. Could we suddenly find him being moved up to the paper’s Mining Editor, after all he did have the title of Mineweb Editor at Moneyweb.

          In the Letters to the Editor in the same edition Dave Harris fortifies my point perfectly. Headed Sunday Times is no holy cow he wrote that the paper had rightly shown no sympathy for KPMG, but we must not forget that by its own admission it had made mistakes in its reporting of the SARS investigative unit.

          “Barney Mthombothi (columnist) writes that the media has done a sterling job of exposing malpractice, while your editorial demands all must come clean and take it on the chin,” he continued.

          “The Sunday Times always needs to take into account its own fallibility, otherwise it may be the case of people in glass houses throwing stones.”

          Well it is certainly not making any admissions in the Jones case. It is doing exactly the opposite to coming clean, or taking it on the chin.

          How long can we expect this love affair to continue? And what will it do to the paper’s reputation, especial among the business fraternity that is well equipped to see the implications of this sort of thing.

          Before I posted this I sent a copy to Bonamour and invited him to make any comments he wished.

          He retorted that it was “bizarre that you would drag me into this when I don’t choose columnists nor do I interfere in ST or any publication. Media accounts for 20% of our business. I had never heard of Jim Jones until you emailed me.”

          It certainly was bizarre that he didn’t mention this in the first place.

Anonymous contributor

          He told me to take this up with the Editor of the Sunday Times and the Editor of the Business Times which I had already done.

He ended by saying: “You are welcome to run whatever story you like.”

So here goes.

          Regards,

          Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman, who tells you what the main stream media won’t normally reveal about its fellow club members.

*Note: Jimmy Johns is a substantial American sandwich restaurant chain and James Jones, known as Jack Jones was a well known British trade union leader who died in 2009. Were these the people Bonamour was thinking of when he got Jim Jones’ background so terribly wrong and asked me: “Are you sure you have the eighth(sic) person.”

EXPOSED - THE SUNDAY TIMES' LOVE AFFAIR WITH A CROOK

Dear Newspaper Readers,

Jim Jones

          Is it reasonable for an investigative publication like the Johannesburg based Sunday Times, South Africa’s biggest selling Sunday paper, to go on using a freelance journalist for eight years after it became aware he was a thief?

          That was not all the paper was aware of. It also knew that he had used his position as a writer for its business section (Business Times) to get his own back on a firm that had fired him.

          Every week this paper has something to say about the wrong doings of others, yet it is blind to its own deplorable morality when it comes to Jim Jones.

          It seems that because he was the Editor of Business Day, a paper in the same group as the Sunday Times for 10 years until 2000 when he was replaced by Peter Bruce, this gave him a clean record forever, regardless of his more recent, shady past.

          In October 2009 Noseweek, South Africa’s only investigative magazine, turned the spotlight on Jones’ thieving ways in an article headed High on the Hogg.

How Jim Jones ripped off his website employer and then spun the story.

          Jones then aged 67 lived mostly in France but still wrote for Business Times as a freelance. In August of that year he cause a stir with a scathing report about Moneyweb, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed website that had fired him as its Mineweb Editor.

          It turned out that he diverted $20 489 (About R200 000 then) due to Moneyweb by a Canadian firm into the Mauritius bank account of P.J. News Service, which just happened to be his own company. He only returned the money to Moneyweb after being threatened with a criminal prosecution.

          The Jones broadside described Moneyweb’s performance as “shambolic” with “tumbling” advertising revenue and a debtor’s book that showed an “astounding deterioration.” It could hardly have been more derogatory.

          “The full might of the Sunday Times was brought to bear on our small company with falsehoods published as fact and not so much as a suggestion that we be asked for a response to some of the outrageous claims,” said Alec Hogg the founder of Moneyweb.

Alec Hogg

          “My initial response was to ignore the nonsense. Surely people would see through the axe grinding of a former employee who was forced to repay R200 000 that he had stolen from our company.”

          According to Noseweek the Sunday Times group’s in-house ombudsman Thabo Leshilo was asked to adjudicate. I had found him particularly ineffective when dealing with my own complaints that the Sunday Times was promoting scamsters by accepting their obviously suspect get-rich-quick advertisements.

          In Moneyweb’s case he was no better. Noseweek reported he offered Hogg a 30 cm space in the paper to give his side of the story. This was cut to almost half in the editing and the frivolous headline: Jim Jones a naughty boy indeed, told its own story of how seriously the paper regarded what was a particularly unforgivable thing for a journalist to have done.

          It was a disgraceful whitewash job, with the Ombudsman showing his bias, like a distress flare in the middle of the night.

          At the time Jones’ stories were all over the Business Times together with his impressive byline. Then he became the willow the wisp of the business section as it got smaller and small; disappeared for a time only to reappear now and again at bigger and bigger intervals, but still in its hardly noticeable form as if the paper was hoping nobody would notice he was still a contributor.

          In July 2012 Leshilo’s successor Joe Latakgomo wrote in one of his general columns that appeared periodically in the Sunday Times that the “Media must stick to nothing but the truth” as it derives its “moral authority from being trusted.”

          Ironically the following week Jim Jones’ byline reappeared in Business Times after a considerable absence. So I sent Joe an email referring to Jones and asked: “Can you trust a newspaper that continues to employ someone it knows has a record of this kind.”

          He didn’t even have the courtesy to reply.

          I then wrote a post addressed to Joe dubbed:
                    Sunday Times’ phoney morality (phoney)
It criticised, among other things, the way the paper kept on using Jones.

          In December 2015 I posted:
The Sunday Times badly needs a truth drug injection (truth).
I repeated this story about Jones together with other examples I had personally experienced to debunk the paper’s incredible Editorial boasts in its December 6 edition of how perfect it was.

          This was just after Bongani Siqoko became editor, replacing Phylicia Oppelt who disappeared into management.

          Entitled Our commitment to the truth is absolute the Editorial made claims like this:

          “We want to reassure you, our readers and the public at large, that we adhere to and practise the highest standards of ethical and principled journalism.’’

  

          Like continuing to employ a thief.       

“We have been conscious of and responsive to concerns or complaints regarding anything that appears in this paper as part of our public accountability.”

          Like ignoring my complaints that a thief continued to be employed as a writer.

          If anybody among the top brass at the paper ever read my posts they probably dismissed them as the ravings of an ex-Sunday Times journo who is now well over the hill. How else could they explain the suggestion that they should actually practise what they preach?

          Just when I thought the Sunday Times’ love affair with Jim Jones was finally over HE WAS BACK.

          In last weeks’ edition his byline was on a whole page story in Business Times about the centenary celebrations of the Anglo American Corporation. His return was welcomed as if it was some kind of coup with a mention under the Inside heading on the front of the main paper. JIM JONES Anglo’s century of twists and turns it said.

          Noseweek told us this former mining engineer turned journalist once had his offer to ghost write the autobiography of the late Harry Oppenheimer, Anglo’s Chairman for 25 years, turned down. If only the Sunday Times had been as perceptive? 

          I sent separate emails to the Sunday Times Editor Bongani Siqoko and the Editor of Business Times Ron Derby questioning Jones reappearance and needless to say I didn’t get a reply from either of them.

          It’s understandable. You can’t justify something like this.

The answer is he was not big enough. I got a read report but
nothing else

          Hogg moved on from Moneyweb to found Biznews, which is similar.

          And when I asked him if it was THE JIM JONES who was back at the Sunday Times he replied: “Memories are short.”

          As the Sunday Times itself might say about the Gupta brothers, Jones must have the right connections.

          But whatever the background is, he can only tarnish the paper’s reputation and how can it be sure he won’t use it once again to settle one of his personal vendettas.

          Regards,

          Jon, the Poorman’s Press Ombudsman.

PETER BRUCE & THE JOYS OF JOURNOS MAKING THEIR OWN HEADLINES

Dear Peter Bruce, Tiso Blackstar (formerly Times Media) Editor at Large,

          I see you have been having fun with the Guptas. As a journalist the joys of exposing the crooks of this world are never ending now that they can easily hit back via the internet.

          Unlike writing for a newspaper they don’t have to worry about whether what they tell the world is true or not because it’s so difficult to track them down.

          Of course my blog is not in the same league as the publications you write for, but I have taken my share of crooks to task over the years.

We are never too old to learn and your experience has taught me a few things that I hadn’t thought of up to now.

          While you have been accused of cheating on your wife the wide boy I wrote about was not quite so direct when he implied that I was a paedophile who had been jailed for “spreading child pornography.”

          Having smeared me like this in a post he emphasised that whatever the truth people always believed the worst. He then went on to say “that was just a story, but it happened to someone you know.”

          His purpose was to try and show that what I had written on my blog about his criminal activity was an equally fabricated story. Unlike your case where the author was not identified he openly headed his attacked on me with: Kevin Cholwich Labeled (sic).

          After you wrote some not too complimentary things about that immigrant Gupta family, who has capture the imagination of South Africans in more ways than one for years now I see they set up a website to get their own back.

          As you wrote in your latest Business Day column they had you secretly followed and took pictures of you and your wife walking the dogs as well as when you went to a business to order custom made collars for the animals.

          “When the owner walked me back to my car and gave me a goodbye hug they photographed that too,” you told us. That it seems was their basis for saying you had been unfaithful to your wife.

          But if you don’t mind me asking Peter who gets a “goodbye hug” from the “dog collar lady” as you called her unless she happens to be a close relative or…..

          Anyway I can tell you now that after reading about your experience I have stopped hugging our 23 year old, blonde model-like, dog parlour owner every time I take our two poodles in for a cut.

          You never know who is waiting round the corner with some high tech camera ready to catch that compromising moment.

          Also if we go for a walk with our grandchildren I keep well a way from them. My wife can be holding their hands on one side of the road while I just wave to them from the other side.

          You can imagine what my friend Kevin or others I have upset might do with a picture of me looking lovingly down at my six year old granddaughter, especially after the seven year prison sentence Kevin claimed I had been given.

          What got up his nose was a post I wrote in May 2012 in which he was mentioned:noseweek exposes dearjon. A shortened version of it appeared in Noseweek South Africa’s only investigative magazine. Cholwich and his partner in crime Francois Buys had just been exposed on Carte Blanche, the TV investigative channel, as having defrauded numerous people out of a total of more than R100-million with a variety of scams.

          Buys was the only one of the two who had the guts to appear on the show to answer the allegations made against them. The experience evidently proved too much for him because he hung himself a few weeks later. And you don’t do that if you are innocent.

          By coincidence the main thrust of my post was about how I had tried unsuccessfully for years to get the Sunday Times, a paper in your media stable, to stop carrying get-rich-quick advertisements, many of which turned out to be promoting the scams run by Cholwich and Buys. As long as their advertising kept coming in this paper that is promoted as being an expose` publication conveniently ignored their dodgy activities.

          In a different series of posts I also upset the smooth talking Kevin Pearman by shining a light on his shady investment scams. He managed to briefly con Cell C and Telkom into allowing him to sell their services through a network of agents with the only winner being Pearman. He also used the Blue Bulls rugby club logo to promote a scheme that offered unbelievable interest returns. People who invested hundreds of thousands lost it all.

          At one stage Pearman employed Cholwich to sell for him.

          For a long time after my last post about Pearman’s shlenter deals I got anonymous calls on my land line in the earlier hours of the morning. And in an email I saw he blamed me for Buys’ suicide.

          For two years I wrote a hard hitting column Business is Business in the Sunday Times in which I took big business to task for behaving badly. But that was in a different era.

          Things are a lot worse now that anger, spiced with all kinds of lies to attract the most attention, can be easily whipped up in seconds on the internet.

          When you get threatened by a Gupta linked mob surrounding your house journalism is getting more precarious than ever in this Wild South that we now live in.

          Now we have to convince people, especially our wives, close relatives and friends to forget about the old saying: "You can’t believe everything they write in the papers” and replace it with: “Don’t believe anything about me that they put on the internet.”

          You do have the advantage of having a big group behind you. Bloggers like me are on our own.

          Perhaps it’s time for all of us journos to go back to reporting on church fetes and bowls matches

          Happy hunting,

          Regards,

          Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman and Consumer Watchdog.

See these samples:Pay back money? Blue Bulls logo hijacked; telkom scuppers another pearman get-rich-scheme; Cell C conned

P.S. As some of my posts revealed the established media have a lot to answer for on occasions, so they can also be no better than the internet at times. It’s just that it’s a lot easier to find out where to deliver the summons.

P.P.S. Presumably your firm’s new name of Tiso Blackstar is to dispel any notion that it might be financed by that much maligned “white minority capital.”  

THE SUNDAY TIMES BADLY NEEDS A TRUTH DRUG INJECTION

Dear Newspaper Readers,

Pearlie Joubert - journo who
started it all

          Today’s Johannesburg based Sunday Times carries an Editorial entitled Our commitment to the truth is absolute. Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!

          This appears to have been prompted by its now ex-journalist Pearlie Joubert who took her own paper to task for what she considered to be the unethical way it conducted an investigation into a rogue unit at the South Africa Revenue Service.

            I won’t go into the details as this has been widely reported elsewhere. The paper of course has stated that her allegations are completely unfounded.

            My concern however is the accuracy of this Editorial. From my own firsthand experience I believe that the paper needs a strong dose of the truth drug.

THAT EDITORIAL

          Here are some of the extremely moral claims it makes for itself in that Editorial. I will then tell you about my experiences with the paper as the self appointed Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman. You can judge for yourself just how honest the Sunday Times actually is.

          “We want to reassure you, our readers, and the public at large, that we adhere to and practise the highest standards of ethical and principled journalism,” is one of them. Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!

          “We have always (take special note of this word) been bound by a code of ethics and acted within the law, and have respected public expectations. We have been conscious of and responsive to concerns or complaints regarding anything that appears in this paper as part of our public accountability system.” Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!

          “Our journalists, editors and other editorial staff are expected to - and have (another word of special note) – operated within these ethical, legal, institutional and professional bounds.” Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!

“All these form part of our values, ethos and our social contract with our readers.

“We have never abused your trust, and never will.” Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!

“We will never forget that we derive our mandate and legitimacy from this public trust. It is required of us that we exercise our power, mandate and duty with the utmost care - ethically and responsibly, holding ourselves to the same standards we expect of others.” Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!

“We constantly remind ourselves that our conduct must never be motivated or influenced by anything other than the public interest.” Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!

“Therefore any insinuation that we have been swayed by anything other than the public interest is baseless.” HA-HA! HA-HA! HA-HA!

VERY LATEST
THIS IS THE BIGGEST JOKE OF ALL. THE DAILY MAVERICK'S
REPORT JUST THREE DAYS AFTER THE "WE ARE SO HONEST"
EDITORIAL APPEARED

If there is no fiction in all this self praise how does the paper explain the following? For several years until a couple of years ago it had its own in house ombudsman. The first one didn’t last long and nor did the second one. I raised complaints with both of them and got nowhere.

Now they don’t have one at all. My belief is they were causing too much embarrassment. One even made the absurd suggestion in print that corrections should be given the same prominence in the paper as the original story. The paper couldn’t possibly have its mistakes exposed in this fashion could it?

In about 2009 I began what turned out to be a long running campaign on my blog to get the Sunday Times to stop carrying get-rich-quick ads that were so obviously scams because the returns being offered were far, far too good to be true.

I sent my first complaint to Thabo Leshilo the ombudsman at the time.

In an article naming me that he wrote in the paper he indicated that something would be done to ensure these no longer appeared. His view was that “Ads like the rest of the paper had to be believable.”

Inevitably nothing happened. Money was clearly more important to the paper than morality. This made nonsense of the Editorial's claim that “We have been conscious of and responsive to concerns or complaints regarding anything that appears in this paper as part of our public accountability system.”

            In December 2010 I wrote a post headed Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman sensors Sunday Times (sensorship) addressed to the paper’s business journalist Brendan Peacock who had written an article in the business section (Business Times) headed “Hallmarks of a Scam.”

          I asked whether he read his own paper because while it carried his “sanctimonious article on how not to get scammed” it continued to carry ads which were clearly scams as they complied with just about everything mentioned in his article.

          The ads continued to appear and no doubt people who could least afford it continued to lose a life time of savings. So much for the paper’s concern for the interests of the public. (“We constantly remind ourselves that our conduct must never be motivated or influenced by anything other than the public interest.”)

          In September 2011 I wrote another post headed Sunday Times – haven for dubious adverts (dubious ads). This was after I had complained to Leshilo’s successor Joe Latakgomo and he had written an article headed “Beware of dubious adverting claims.”

          In it he said these “erode the public trust in newspapers. We are distressed by the number of scams that infiltrate our pages and cheat our readers. We will continue as journalists to expose those that cheat and lie to our readers.”

Joe Latakgomo writing about my
complaint

          But as far as I know the Sunday Times (I get it every week) did not expose these crooks that were making a packet by advertising in its own paper and nor did it stop taking the ads. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you however rotten that hand happens to be seems to have been its thinking.

Joe again

It’s hard then to understand how that Editorial had the gall to tell us that the paper prides itself as being known for its “ethical, award-winning and uncompromising investigative reporting that exposes wrongdoing.” 

The warning Joe was talking about above that the
     paper seemed to think absolved it from any
     responsibility for what happened to investors

In May 2012 I wrote another post headed Noseweek exposes Dearjon letter (dearjon-letter exposed). It was addressed to Ray Hartley the Sunday Times editor at the time and was a longer version of what I had written for Noseweek, South Africa’s only investigative magazine.

I told Ray that it was “deplorable the way your paper has been promoting crooks for years.”
                 

I referred him to an expose` that had just been aired on the Carte Blanche TV channel. It revealed that Kevin Cholwich and François Buys had defrauded people out of millions and two of the companies they used were Whoopee and Geo Connect. And surprise, surprise these were ones that I had complained about when their ads appeared in the Sunday Times.

One investor, a 47 year old mother of two lost her entire pension of R250 000 accumulated over 10 years of hard graft after she put it into Whoopee.

This might never have happened if the Sunday Times practised anything like what it preaches.

It was only after this that these kinds of dubious ads seemed to disappear from the Sunday Times. Of course it would never admit that I had anything to do with this.

JONES IN NOSEWEEK

       Another shocking example of the questionable morality at this paper involved Jim Jones the former Editor of Business Day in Johannesburg who had been a freelance writer for Business Times.

Nobody it appears had bothered to check his most recent background so when he started writing for the Sunday Times they didn’t know, or if they did they ignored it, that he had been fired by his previous employer, Moneyweb for helping himself to R200 000 of the firm’s money.

Things came to a head when he used his position on the Sunday Times to write a scathing article about Moneyweb, an online financial investment reporting firm that is quoted on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The Sunday Times was forced to apologise and a damning Noseweek article exposed him as a crook.

At the time Alec Hogg, Moneyweb’s founder said Jones was fired by his firm and forced to repay the R200 000 he had stolen.

At this stage the Sunday Times could not have had any excuse for not being fully aware that Jones could only damage the paper’s reputation if he continued to write for it, especially in the business section.

Yet it continued to employ him. After disappearing for a while his byline reappeared.

In July 2012 Joe Latakgomo wrote in one of his general columns that appeared periodically in the Sunday Times that the “Media must stick to nothing but the truth” as it derived its “moral authority from being trusted.”

Ironically the following week Jim Jones’ byline reappeared in Business Times. So I sent Joe an email referring to Jones and asked: “Can one trust a newspaper that continues to employ someone it knows has a record of this kind.”

He didn’t even have the courtesy to reply. Was this being “conscious of and responsive to concerns or complaints regarding anything that appears in this paper as part of our public accountability system?”

I then wrote another post entitled Sunday Times’ phoney morality (phoney morality).

At the time of the Noseweek article Jones’ reports were all over Business Times together with his impressive byline. Then it got smaller and smaller only to disappear for a while and then reappear at bigger and bigger intervals before fading out completely. It looked as though somebody was very reluctant to see him go.

SO IF PEARLIE JOUBERT HAS BEEN TELLING FANCIFUL STORIES AS THE PAPER ALLEGES I CAN SEE WHERE SHE GOT THE IDEA FROM – HER OLD PAPER ITSELF, THE SUNDAY TIMES THAT HAS BEEN SETTING SUCH A POOR EXAMPLE.

LATEST, LATEST: This appeared on the front page of the
              Sunday Times just 14 days are after that "We are so perfect" Editorial

Regards,

Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman who tries to tell it like it is and not as he thinks people would like to hear it.