City & Business: Afrikaner dirt surfaces

OUR LEAD story, about the South African central bank's irregular support for an Afrikaner private banktakes a story broken in this country by Bill Jamieson of the Sunday Telegraph a few more inches down the road of hidden traps and resistance. In February, Jamieson revealed that ex- Bank of England officials had prepared a confidential - and critical - report on South Africa's central bank for the Mandela government. Readers following this story may wish to pay particular attention to the part of Martin Tomkinson's article beginning on page one sketching the links between the private Afrikaner bank in question, an institution called ABSA, and an organisation called the Directorate of Covert Collections.

The DCC is widely believed to have been a front for the international hit squads linked to the security forces during the apartheid years. If it turns out that South Africa's central bank, ABSA, and the DCC were moving funds abroad to finance apartheid's wet jobs, the question arises who in Western capitals provided professional services to them?