Text: Gavin Foster. Article from the March 2014 issue of Noseweek Magazine.
He cleverly employed contractors who couldn’t afford legal fights.
Celebrity televangelists and faith healers by their own account rely heavily on frequent one-on-one consultations with Jesus Christ. One can but hope the good Lord helps South African Faith Like Potatoes evangelist Angus Buchan educate his right-hand man, Bruce Winship, on the Christian values of honesty, trust and compassion.
Winship has been described at various times as a pastor, Buchan’s media spokesman and a key part of the organising team of the Mighty Men Conference. He is also a trustee of Buchan’s Shalom Ministries, but in his other life he’s a very successful businessman who for 22 years has been CEO of a family-owned Durban construction enterprise, Grid Group, which has been responsible for some of KwaZulu-Natal’s most ambitious developments. Apart from his work with Buchan’s ministry, Winship strives to ensure his spot in heaven by helping his wife, Gayle, run her Keep the Dream Foundation that raises funds for school bags and books for orphans and underprivileged children in rural KwaZulu-Natal.
On one hand, Winship was probably very unhappy to feature in a Carte Blanche episode, “Builder Blues”, flighted on 17 November, but on the other, relieved that the bare-all television show didn’t drag Angus Buchan, Mighty Men, Shalom Ministries or the Keep the Dream Foundation into the fracas. The show aired the complaints of 29 subcontractors who said Grid owed them close on R20 million. All had similar stories: Winship would sign contracts with them and when the work was done or the goods delivered, ignore the contracts and short-pay them – usually by considerable margins – and many months late. This was despite monthly progress certificates being signed off by quantity surveyors who recorded any quality issues or damages before authorising payment of the adjusted amounts due.
Under interrogation, Winship appeared incapable of understanding that other peoples’ businesses were just as important to them as Grid was to him. Carte Blanche’s Devi Sankaree Govender asked him why he had withheld R284,000 of payments to air conditioning contractor Yvonne Donnelly. In response he had shown her photographs of damage allegedly caused by her workers.
Govender: “How do you pinpoint who did this damage?”
Winship: “We have to make some assumptions. The chances are, if you damage the ceiling that’s not the electrician, that is the air conditioning contractor.”
Govender: “Then why was it not reflected on any of the certificates? At some stage it should have been there.”
Winship: “It must be reflected on… maybe the final one which you maybe don’t have.”
Donnelly had shown Carte Blanche all of the certificates, with no damages or penalties ever listed.
Govender: “The whole reason for this JBCC (Joint Building Contracts Committee) contract is to manage a mess exactly like this. There is a line that says ‘Damages’. Just fill it in!”
Winship: “Ultimately it’s too intensive to… On a monthly basis, on all the contracts, to document that detail.”
Nearly all the contractors had the same gripe: when damages were alleged, they were told only at the end of the job, when it was too late for them to investigate or make good anything that was possibly their fault. Nothing was ever recorded on interim payment authorities, despite the JBCC contract stating clearly that damages and penalties should be deducted and explained on each monthly payment certificate as they arose. This is standard practice in the industry.
(Within in days of Carte Blanche’s having highlighted Donnelly’s case, Winship paid up the full R284,000.)
Winship seems to believe he has been granted divine power when it comes to running his business and punishing those who cross him. When steel contractor Anton Fouche’s amount owed by Grid topped R700,000 he downed tools because he’d put in six months of work without being paid. Winship then instructed his staff to penalise him R300,000 per day for two days for penalties because he “got clever”.
Govender: “What do you mean – got clever?”
Winship: “You can’t walk off site.”
Govender: “Yes you can.”
Winship: ‘You can’t do that – they are in breach. At the end of the contract…”
Govender: “No, you are in breach because you didn’t pay him first.”
Winship: “Well, that’s a fact…”
Another issue with Winship and his subcontractors is the matter of retention monies. The industry norm is 10% retention of the amount due, to be held for three months after the building has been handed over to the client, to cover warranty or quality issues. Winship prefers a three-year retention period.
“We’re nervous to pay subcontractors too early,” he told Carte Blanche. “We’ve had many cases where contractors have run away once we’ve paid them, where the contractors have gone bankrupt and for the next five years we remain accountable. So we want to be clear and very sure the products that they have produced are done correctly.”
It doesn’t seem to have entered his head that withholding funds from small businesses for ridiculously unreasonable periods is more likely to drive them to the wall. Or he doesn’t care. One of his victims told Noseweek Winship sent a message to his staff stating that it was “not Grid’s intention to pay retention”.
Perhaps Winship’s lack of empathy for those he’s stung so badly they all loathe him, was shown when the R20m he owed the 29 contractors interviewed by Carte Blanche was bandied about.
“In the last three years we’ve done a R1 billion – in excess of a R1bn’s worth – of work. So R20m outstanding to contractors at this moment in time is well within the context,” he explained. Ah. That’s all right then.
Noseweek tracked down a number of Winship’s unhappy creditors to see whether justice had been done. Apparently not. Anton Fouche is still owed about R640,000 for nine projects extending back to 2008. For some of them he has received no payment at all.
“I’ve been in business since 1995 and this is by far the worst person I’ve ever had to deal with,” he says.
“He’s lawyered up to the hilt and it’s not worth going to court because it just gets expensive and drawn out. He seems to have a big problem paying. He can cut prices on his tenders because he knows he’s not going to pay people.”
Luis Morgado Rodrigues says he and Winship used to attend the same church in Umhlanga Rocks but that didn’t help him in his dealings with Grid. It certainly removed any feelings of Christian brotherhood from Rodrigues’s heart.
“You do the work, then he comes up with bullshit excuses not to pay. He owes us almost R2m. While you work for him, he pays in dribs and drabs and when you stop, he stops paying. He has retentions he’s held for six fucking years and tells us he hasn’t been paid by the client. I say, listen, you are the client for the job. He’s just a bullshitter but he knows that taking him to court will cost lots of money and take lots of time. He’s the owner, the guy who presses the buttons, and he’s a crook.”
Rodrigues hasn’t seen Winship at his church for years. Winship now goes to faraway Greytown to worship.
Chris Howes of Chris Howes Construction is one of the few who’ve taken Winship’s company to court and, after a gruelling six-year battle, won.
“He owed me about R230,000 in 2005 and in 2011 or 2012 I finally got my judgment with costs, plus interest. The judge asked him why he’d taken so long to pay and his answer was that he’d just done R1bn’s worth of turnover, as if I wasn’t important enough to have his attention. Every time I tried to talk to him he wouldn’t take my calls. Eventually I got hold of him at 6:30 one morning. He owed me a couple of hundred thousand and he’d paid R70.000 and said he wouldn’t pay any more. I told him I’d see him in court and he told me that I didn’t have the balls or the money to do that.” Howes did.
Ken Hawley has a long history with Winship. “He screwed me out of about R360,000 15 or 20 years ago – that’s how long he’s been a thief and he keeps getting away with it.
“I worked on projects with him and he worked with me. I speak to guys every day who are owed money they’re never going to see. If you offered me a R20m job with Bruce Winship I’d turn it down. He’s big in the church now because he had to go that way to get business but he’s still a thief, Christian or not. He hires small subcontractors who can’t afford to sue.”
Noseweek wanted to contact Winship about the accusations and see if he had any complaints about the way Carte Blanche had reported their story. We first phoned Buchan’s Shalom Ministries and asked whether he was still spokesman. “Well, he’s a trustee,” said the woman on the other end, who “couldn’t” disclose his number but said he would call back. He didn’t, so we called a minister at a church with which Winship has had a long association to seek a contact number. When he heard we were following up on the Carte Blanche story and knew he was associated with the church, he chuckled and said “He was, but I’m thankful he no longer is, my friend.”
Noseweek eventually tracked down Winship, he responded that “some of those issues were resolved ten years ago”. We queried some of the answers he’d given on television to see whether he really meant to say what he did, starting with a query about his view that, as his company (at the time of the Carte Blanche feature) had turned over R1bn in the preceding three years, he still felt R20m in outstanding payments was “within context”.
He said: Ja, of course he did.
Did that mean that a small business turning over R1m a year should feel the same about his withholding half a year’s turnover? His response: Bad line, we should call from a landline.
No answer.
