The investor of the flopped Burna Boy Joburg concert, Gregory Wings, is in hot soup after the First National Bank froze his accounts.
Wings, an American businessman in real estate, opened a case of fraud against his business partner Sedote Nwachukwu in September. Wings is said to have been scammed a sum of R9.1-million by his business partner who fled the country in September.
US-born Nwachukwu left the country immediately after Wings opened a case with the Sandton police.
According to a source who cannot be revealed Nwachukwu and Wings have known each other for 15 years but only became close in the last five years. Wings was approached by Nwachukwu for funding the Burna Boy concert which was set to take place in September at the FNB Stadium.
“Gregory gave Sedote the necessary money and the agreement was that they would split the percentage and he would only be a shareholder in the concert as the funder. Thirty days before the concert, Gregory found out that Sedote had been stealing money from the ticket sales by Ticketpro. He had also not played suppliers and everything was not going according to plan,” said the source.
When Wings discovered that suppliers had not been paid, he tried to pay some but it did not work out because the damage was too deep, leading to the concert being cancelled. Wings is said to have also lost $1.6 million.
The source continued: “With Gregory being in the paperwork which turned out to be fraudulent he took the fall for everything that Sedote had done. He was then arrested for fraud in October and detained at Sun City (Johannesburg Prison) for seven days.”
Shot in the stomach
Wings, with health complications after being shot in the stomach in the US, had a tough time while in detention.
David Modise, who is part of Wings’s legal team, said his client was out on bail and still in the country as per his bail conditions. Police’s criminal proceedings against Wings are continuing.
“We can’t talk about the matter as much as we want to because we must respect the justice system. My client is cooperating with the law, and we are playing open cards with them. We are of the assumption that everything is public knowledge. Our client feels he was scammed by Sedote and I have instruction to approach court sometime next week.”
Modise said Nwachukwu’s attorneys recently sent a letter of demand to the technical events partner Gear House demanding the deposit they had paid for the concert back.
“We trust that investigations are ongoing and we do not want to talk too much about the ongoing process. Our client is fighting for his rights and wants justice to be done. There has been a lot of support given to him.”
