Other Names: YCVM
Location: Unknown
Subordinate to: "Private" owners
Size: Unknown
Primary Function: Technotek was a South Africa-based company that manufactured, tested, and sold protective Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) suits and other CBW protective gear to the South African Defence Force (SADF)

Description:
Technotek was a private company established in 1988 that was owned in equal parts by Project Officer Wouter Basson's WPW Investments firm and by two Belgian businessmen, Bernard Zimmer and Charles van Remoortere. Van Remoortere was previously the South African representative of a Belgian company called Seyntex, which since 1983 had been trying to sell embargoed NBC suits to the South African state armaments company ARMSCOR. In 1986 Basson had asked Van Remoortere to set up a South African company to manufacture NBC suits, and in February 1987 his company YCVM – renamed Technotek the following year – signed a contract with Basson's company Regent International Trading Services (RITS) to deliver 45,000 NBC suits and a range of accessories (such as rubber boots, earth gloves, nerve agent antidote autoinjectors, and Israeli Shalom gas masks) to the SADF. By April 1990 Technotek had delivered 43,000 NBC suits to a secret Coast warehouse on Court Street in Pretoria West, where 47 drums of "poisonous acid" were already stored. This warehouse was later sublet by another company called Intramex, which had been set up by Basson's business associate Tjaard Viljoen in October 1987 to handle the future buying and selling of CBW protective clothing and equipment.

At that point Basson asked Van Remoortere to submit a quotation for the sale of 9568 olive drab suits to ARMSCOR, which resulted in RITS selling the suits back to Technotek, which then sold them to ARMSCOR for a profit. This effectively meant that the SADF had paid twice for the same suits. This was the beginning of a process by which Technotek was used for other shady financial transactions by Basson, including a costly deal with business entities run by unscrupulous Iranian con men. In May 1991 a new contract was signed between Technotek and the Coast financial front company D. John Truter Financial Consultants for the delivery of another 25,000 NBC suits to the SADF. That same year Technotek also sold 31,332 "surplus" NBC suits, some of which had already been paid for by the SADF, to Seyntex, which then resold them to belligerents in the Gulf War. Virtually none of these suits ever reached Angola, where Jonas Savimbi's troops were ostensibly in need of them. Between 1990 and 1993, Technotek was paid a total of just over 49 million rand for NBC suits from Project Coast funds.

Key Sources:
Marléne Burger and Chandré Gould, Secrets and Lies: Wouter Basson and South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2002), pp. 99-100, 149; Centre for Conflict Resolution, Basson Trial: Weekly Summaries of Court Proceedings, October 1999-April 2002, especially the testimony of Van Remoortere, Bruwer, Knobel, Neethling, Bruwer, Tjaard Viljoen, Zimmer, Niekerk, Bezuidenhout, and Basson, and the remarks of lawyer Jaap Cilliers; Chandré Gould and Peter Folb, Project Coast: Apartheid's Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2002), p. 112; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Hearings, June-July 1998, especially the testimony of Van Remoortere, Neethling, and Knobel.

	Updated March 2004