Creditors of Banxso (Pty) Ltd (In Liquidation) are meeting at the Master's Office in Cape Town tomorrow morning to vote on twenty-seven resolutions that could significantly impact their financial futures. Understanding the lessons from a previous liquidation involving the same professionals is crucial for making informed decisions.
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Creditors of Banxso (Pty) Ltd (In Liquidation) are convening at the Master's Office in Cape Town tomorrow morning. They will be handed twenty-seven resolutions and asked to adopt them all. Before they do, there is a cautionary tale written in the numbers of another liquidation involving some of the same professionals. Those numbers should be read carefully.
This is the second in a series of reports on the administration of Banxso (Pty) Ltd (In Liquidation), Master's Reference C548/2025. The first report, published yesterday, examined the R12.7 million fee structure of the joint liquidators, the R11.6 million legal bill paid to attorneys Mostert and Bosman without passing through the taxing master's office, and a handwritten annotation on an official voucher in which the word "taxed" was struck through and replaced in manuscript with the words "by consent," appearing to show that the standard protection afforded to creditors was quietly set aside.
Tomorrow morning, Friday May 15, 2026, at 9am, the second statutory meeting of creditors, members, and contributories of Banxso (Pty) Ltd (In Liquidation) will convene before the Presiding Officer at the Master of the High Court office, Cape Town.
Creditors who attend will be handed a document containing twenty-seven draft resolutions and asked to adopt them. They will also be asked, under Resolution 26, to formally approve and adopt the Section 402 report submitted by the joint liquidators, the very report whose cost disclosures, omissions, and accuracy are the subject of formal legal challenge raised in writing with both the liquidators and the Master of the High Court.
Documentation relating to those challenges was provided to this publication by a source with knowledge of the proceedings who asked not to be identified. When contacted, Bloemfontein attorney Kobus Senekal of FJ Senekal Incorporated confirmed that correspondence bearing his name and that of his firm had been sent to the relevant parties. He declined to comment further, saying the correspondence spoke for itself.
Before examining the resolutions on tomorrow's agenda, creditors attending the meeting at the Cape Town Master's office would be well advised to acquaint themselves with the trajectory of Mirror Trading International (Pty) Ltd (In Liquidation), Master's Reference C906/2020, the liquidation that Banxso itself cited in the Western Cape High Court as a warning of what was coming.
MTI was declared by the Western Cape High Court in April 2023 to be a pyramid and Ponzi-type scheme. It was placed into final liquidation in June 2021. The scheme involved hundreds of thousands of people across 140 countries and, by the most conservative estimates, drew in bitcoin worth at least R14.7 billion. According to reporting by MyBroadband, court documents put the funds flowing through MTI at 29,421 bitcoin.
The liquidators of MTI recovered 1,281 bitcoin from Belize-based broker FXChoice in early 2021, selling it at a favourable rate for approximately R1.1 billion. That remained, for years, the sum total of meaningful recovery.
The MTI liquidators, as Moneyweb reported in November 2025, receive ten per cent on all recoveries. Critics of the administration argued in court filings that it was in the liquidators' self-interest to prolong litigation for years, even where the prospects of success were doubtful, because each new phase of proceedings generated further fees. The liquidators disputed that characterisation.
Herman Bester, one of the five joint liquidators named in the Banxso first account, is also a liquidator in the MTI estate. The attorneys who brought the liquidation on behalf of the applicants and who are now instructed to run all the legal matter of the Banxso estate, and whose invoices in the first account total R11,629,177.23, are Mostert and Bosman, the same firm appointed by the MTI liquidators as their legal counsel in that estate.
As reported earlier Banxso itself raised this connection in the Western Cape High Court proceedings, noting that Pierre du Toit of Mostert and Bosman, the attorney pursuing the Banxso liquidation, was appointed by Bester and his fellow MTI liquidators to act as their legal counsel in the MTI matter. According to figures cited in reporting on the MTI estate, Mostert and Bosman earned close to R25 million from that liquidation up to the last published Liquidation and Distribution account in 2023. The firm dismissed the conflict-of-interest allegation, stating that all fees in such matters are based on statutory tariffs or agreed service level agreements overseen by the Master of the High Court.
The MTI liquidation is now in its fifth year. The creditors who lost money have received nothing in the way of a provisional payout. The professionals administering the estate have, by the account of those same creditors, consumed half of the only significant asset recovery made in the entire administration.
Banxso creditors attending tomorrow's meeting are looking at year one. The resolutions on the table would, if adopted, set the terms for every year that follows, no different to those approved in the MTI matter.
Resolution 3.7 states: "That the Liquidator/s be duly authorised to agree any tariff and/or scale of rates to be used in determination of any Legal or other Fees, and in his/their sole discretion to agree the quantum of such fees, which legal Fees shall be on an Attorney and own Client basis."
Attorney and own client is the most expensive basis on which legal costs can be assessed in South African practice. It is the scale courts apply when marking their displeasure at a litigant's conduct, covering the full extent of what an attorney has charged rather than the standard party and party tariff. In an insolvency context, authorising liquidators to agree fees on that basis, in their sole discretion, without reference to creditors or the taxing master, is an authority of remarkable breadth.
Resolution 3.8 provides that all costs incurred are to be treated as costs of administration in the estate. Resolution 1 confirms and ratifies all actions taken by the liquidators and provisional liquidators to date. The combined effect of all three, if adopted, would be to approve everything already spent and to authorise whatever may follow on terms that foreclose independent scrutiny. Those costs rank ahead of any distribution to creditors.
Resolution 4 authorises the investigation of voidable dispositions and the institution of legal proceedings, with costs on the same attorney and own client terms. Resolution 5 authorises the collection of outstanding debts and the appointment of debt collectors on the same basis. Resolution 22 ratifies all costs incurred by the liquidators in maintaining, conserving, and realising assets, confirming them as costs of administration payable by the estate. Resolution 27 places the further administration of the company's affairs entirely in the hands of the liquidators, subject only to the direction of creditors, the Master, or the Court.
Read together, these resolutions vest in the liquidators an authority to spend, engage, litigate, and settle at rates of their own agreement, on the most expensive scale in South African legal practice, with all past actions ratified and all future costs confirmed as ranking ahead of creditor distributions. The 216 proven creditors of Banxso, whose combined claims total R194,379,545.72 and who have thus far received not a cent from the first account, are the people being asked to endorse this.
That is not a reason to refuse every resolution. Some of the powers sought are standard in any complex liquidation. It is, however, a reason to attend, to ask questions, and to understand precisely what each resolution means before a hand is raised.
The court record contains something creditors would do well to read. In the final liquidation proceedings, Banxso itself warned the Western Cape High Court that this outcome was coming.
In the judgment delivered by Le Grange J on 2 March 2026, the court recorded that Banxso had vigorously argued that the application had largely been driven by the applicants' attorneys, Mostert and Bosman, for their own financial gain and that of friendly liquidators. Banxso further contended that Mostert and Bosman had a serious conflict of interest by representing both the provisional liquidators, who must scrutinise claims, and the creditor-clients whose claims were being scrutinised. The company also argued that a liquidation would see its funds depleted by legal and liquidation fees, as allegedly happened in the Mirror Trading International matter. The judge noted that while these accusations were deeply serious and might require further investigation from the relevant authorities, they could not stop the liquidation order being granted.
Banxso denied any wrongdoing throughout. Its principals maintained that the company was solvent, that the licence suspension was subject to a reconsideration application, and that it was willing to settle all legitimate claims.
The court, on the balance of the evidence before it at the time, granted the final liquidation order. The warning Banxso placed on record, that professional fees would consume the estate, is now being tested against the arithmetic of the first Liquidation and Distribution Account. On those numbers, the prediction was not wrong. In under nine months, more than R24 million has been absorbed in professional fees, liquidator fees, forensic costs, and associated expenses. The 216 proven creditors have received nothing.
There is a prior matter that goes to the basic fairness of the process: the position of Banxso's former employees.
South African insolvency law places employee claims in a position of statutory preference. Under section 98A and related provisions of the Insolvency Act, certain categories of employee entitlements rank ahead of concurrent creditors in the distribution of an insolvent estate. Employees who lose their jobs when a company is wound up are among the most vulnerable parties to any insolvency, and the law provides them a degree of protection that reflects that vulnerability.
In this matter, the former employees appear to have been failed at every stage of the process designed to protect them.
The Section 402 report submitted to creditors records the position as it stood at the first meeting in these terms: "The HR manager had submitted a schedule of erstwhile employees at the first meeting of creditors without any documentation in support of any claim against the company. The Master ordered the liquidators to investigate whether the erstwhile employees have any claims against the company."
That account is directly challenged in correspondence reviewed by this publication. The letter, sent by the employees' attorney to Tygerberg Trustees on 5 May 2026, sets out the factual record as those former employees understand it. The liquidators' report is said to record that submissions were made on behalf of former employees that were allegedly not considered due to the absence of claims or supporting documentation. The employees' attorney states that he personally lodged the claims with the affidavit of the HR manager, together with supporting documentation, and asks that the basis for the liquidators' contrary statement be explained.
The discrepancy is not minor. The liquidators' report, in stating that no claims or supporting documents were provided, forms the basis on which the employee claims were set aside at the first meeting. If claims were in fact lodged with an affidavit and supporting documentation, as the correspondence asserts, the factual foundation of that statement collapses.
The correspondence raises a further point about the legal framework. The position apparently adopted by the Master, as it appears from the record, is that employee claims need only be lodged when employees intend to vote on the liquidators' report and the passing of resolutions, and that such claims may accordingly stand over for the second meeting.
If that is the correct position, then the dismissal of the employee submissions at the first meeting on the basis that no claims had been provided was not merely factually wrong. It was procedurally unnecessary under the very framework the Master was applying.
The claims did not need to be lodged at the first meeting at all if the employees were not seeking to vote at that stage. The liquidators' report requires explanation on two grounds: what the documents show happened, and whether the stated basis for non-consideration was legally correct in the first place.
The correspondence reviewed by this publication raises a further concern about the physical location of the employee claim documents. It notes that the claims appear to have been uplifted by the offices of one of the liquidators, and asks for confirmation of whether this is correct, given that original documents are required to be lodged twenty-four hours prior to the meeting.
Under the applicable regulations, claim documents must be lodged with the Presiding Officer twenty-four hours before the meeting at which they are to be considered. If original claim documents were removed from wherever they were filed and are held in the offices of one of the liquidators, the question of whether they were then properly lodged in accordance with the regulations becomes one of procedural compliance that the Presiding Officer at tomorrow's meeting would be expected to address.
If original documents were not lodged on time, the former employees would be procedurally excluded from participation in a meeting where their preferent claims are directly at stake, as well as their right to vote on the proposed resolutions, through no fault of their own and to the direct benefit of those whose costs rank below the preferent employee claims in the statutory order of payment.
Beyond the employee claims, the correspondence identifies a governance concern that strikes at the validity of the report itself.
Six liquidators were appointed at the final stage. The Section 402 report circulated to creditors bears the signatures of five. Vaughn Victor, appointed as a final liquidator alongside the others, appears on the signature page template but without a completed date or a signed copy in the documents provided to creditors.
The significance is not merely formal. Correspondence reviewed by this publication notes that communications from one of the named liquidators suggest disagreements exist amongst the liquidators about the contents of the report. If that is accurate, the document circulated to creditors does not reflect the unanimous position of the appointed administrators. A report disputed internally by one or more of its proposed signatories cannot properly be said to reflect a constituted and considered position adopted by the liquidators acting jointly.
Resolution 26 asks creditors to adopt that report tomorrow morning. Creditors who vote in favour without knowing of the internal disagreement will not have been in possession of material information at the time they cast their vote.
Creditors who have proved their claims are entitled to attend the second meeting and to vote on the resolutions. A creditor who objects to any resolution may vote against it and place that objection on the record. The Presiding Officer has authority to deal with procedural matters raised at the meeting, including questions about the lodgement of claims and the completeness of the report placed before creditors.
It is understood from correspondence reviewed by this publication that certain of the creditors' legal representatives intend to challenge the validity of the second meeting and to lodge a formal objection to the Liquidation and Distribution Account. Section 381 of the Companies Act has been invoked in correspondence to the Master, compelling the Master to direct a formal investigation into the conduct of liquidators. The Master has been asked to respond before the meeting with an indication of whether the apparent irregularities will be addressed.
At 9am tomorrow morning, at the Master of the High Court offices in Cape Town, decisions will be made that will shape the administration of this estate for years to come. The fees that flow from those decisions will rank ahead of every concurrent creditor's claim. The MTI experience shows what that trajectory looks like when creditors are not in the room or are not heard when they are.
Those creditors have a right to be in that room.