In December 2023 a South African journalist received a written instruction from the man paying for the documentary she was working on. Ask ten leading questions and one direct one, he wrote, and do not talk directly to the forehead. We already know the answer, this is only to make sure. The task is to expose William. What had been commissioned, in other words, was not an inquiry. It was the appearance of one.

This investigation is built on public registers, contemporaneous correspondence and documents the reader can check. Svenskhampa is owned and published by Daniel Johansson personally. He is himself among those defrauded by JuicyFields and acts with other affected investors in claims arising from it. He also put Danmarks Radio in contact with the case at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Gothenburg in 2023 and supplied investigative material to that newsroom. That material was published on juicyfieldscase.com on 18 April 2023, naming those involved, just under a year before Europol's Operation Stoner on 11 April 2024, which led to nine arrests. Danmarks Radio's documentary is discussed below. See Ownership and transparency.

The fraud itself has been investigated. JuicyFields took some €645 million from an estimated 186,000 investors before the platform collapsed in July 2022. An international consortium of journalists made up of Danmarks Radio, Correctiv, Der Spiegel, ZDF, Der Standard, Svenska Dagbladet, BNNVARA and Paper Trail Media published its findings on who was behind it in November 2024. That part of the story has been told.

This investigation is about something else: two separate media events in South Africa which have no established connection to one another, but which both ended up serving the same interest.

It should be said at the outset, because they are easy to confuse: the film commissioned in Cape Town is one strand. The City Press article and the short film on YouTube are the other, they share an author. Between the two strands there is a common target, a common period and one person, but not, so far as Svenskhampa has been able to establish, any client, any payment or any document. Nothing beyond that is claimed here.

Part one: the film that was commissioned

Who was engaged

In December 2023 the South African journalist Latashia Naidoo was engaged to conduct interviews for what she says was presented to her as an independent documentary about South Africa's cannabis industry.

Naidoo is no newcomer. According to her own published biographies she has been a television news correspondent for eNCA, and has worked for TRT World, BBC Africa, CNN and Business Insider US. She was a 2020 fellow of Wits University and the Open Society Foundation, and in 2022 a finalist for the BBC's Komla Dumor Award for outstanding African journalism. She has since worked as an investigative reporter and producer.

That a journalist with that record was engaged is worth noting. What the client wanted from the production appears from the instruction set out below.

The first approach came on 9 August 2023, four months before filming, via Facebook Messenger from an account presenting itself as Andile at the cannabis company Hanapiz in Woodstock, Cape Town. The subject was described as a documentary about the history of cannabis, interviews with people in the industry, visits to farms. Naidoo asked for a production plan, budget, team and schedule. The reply was that they would be in touch.

Svenskhampa has looked for the client at that end. No cannabis company by the name Hanapiz can be established, not in open South African company records, not in industry registers, not in any other open source. The address given is an office building. Nor did the Messenger account carry the name Andile; it read "Khanda Shisa".

Whoever made the first approach, then, claimed to work for a company that cannot be shown to exist.

The client called himself Alex Hilton. According to Naidoo he had travelled in from Russia and communicated through an interpreter, Natalia Mordvinova, who also acted as intermediary with the South African team. Naidoo never met him in person; all contact was by WhatsApp. She engaged a freelance cameraman with his own equipment.

The instruction

On 4 December Alex Hilton wrote to her setting out what the job was. Svenskhampa holds the message in full, supplied by Naidoo herself.

"I'll try to explain what we need. I will tell you how to act. The goal is a short video with information. Questions can be direct and leading. It doesn't matter to us what exactly we ask people about general issues. The important thing is to get an answer to the question of whether they know 'William' and whether he had an agreement to work with them. You need to find out about this carefully, and not talk directly to the forehead. for example, 10 leading questions and one direct one."

Then comes the sentence that settles what this actually was.

"The fact is that we have already learned that they did not deal with William, so this is only necessary to make sure of this."

He knew the answer. The interviews were not there to establish anything. They were commissioned to give a conclusion he had already reached the faces of credible industry figures. That those figures were not to be told what the matter really concerned follows from the instruction itself: the question was to be put carefully, and not directly to the forehead.

The message ends:

"The task is to expose William. You don't need to talk a lot about William, just one or two questions are enough."

Ten leading questions to conceal the only one that mattered. A method for getting real people to say, on camera, a thing that had already been decided, without understanding what they were part of.

What she asked, and what went unanswered

Earlier in the same thread Naidoo had already asked the questions a journalist is supposed to ask.

When Hilton described the job, that the man he called William had received €3.5 million into his company and nothing had been grown, she replied that she wanted clear guidelines before proceeding, and asked what the video would be used for. The answer was that it would show investors the current situation. She then asked:

"Can I have your guarantee this will not be used in a court of law or for evidence in court proceedings?"

That question was never answered. The exchange moved on to something else, and she continued with the production.

Asked about this by Svenskhampa she says: "In hindsight, I should have insisted on receiving an answer before proceeding."

Where she said no

As filming approached, what was expected of her became clearer.

Hilton asked her to record material that was not journalism at all:

"I will give you a text that we can film in Cape Town, since the video will not show where the interview is, for example, near a tree and a fence. I like voice acting of 10 sentences, for example questions and answers."

He wanted a script, read by her, filmed so that the location could not be identified. He also asked her to arrange people who could get onto cultivation facilities at short notice. She replied:

"I won't compromise my reputation by getting people to go to those facilities illegally/to trespass — when I've already established contact with the owners for us to tour the facilities ourselves when we are there."

And when he returned to the voice-over:

"I don't have time tomorrow to do voice acting. And that's not what a documentary is. We're not manufacturing the truth, and I won't do that."

At one point he offered her a permanent position at his company, at a salary she could name herself. She did not take it up.

At the turn of the year she and the cameraman withdrew from the production. The raw material was by then no longer with the team, the cameraman had handed it to the interpreter.

The Telegram group the film team used to communicate no longer exists. Naidoo says she deleted it herself. Svenskhampa has no information about when or why that happened, and makes no claim about it.

What happened after the instruction

What she refused was the manufacture of material out of nothing. Scripts, voice-overs, staged shots, people trespassing on other people's property.

What is documented after that is this. The instruction of 4 December was in her phone. It described leading questions toward an answer already known, and it stated the purpose: to expose a named individual. She went on working after reading it. She returned to the physician and put the questions the client had asked for, about a person the physician did not know. And she conducted the interviews in which four industry figures, named on screen, were asked the same three questions in substance.

Naidoo objects to this being read as her having adopted the client's purpose as her own. Receiving an instruction is not the same as accepting its premise, she says: her role was to ask questions, the participants answered for themselves, and she neither scripted, coached nor shaped their answers. Svenskhampa holds no material showing otherwise, and makes no such claim.

The interviews are her work in the sense that she conducted them. What happened to the raw material once it left the team was outside her control. Three weeks later it was sent out to journalists by JuicyFields' own organisation.

She says she did not know who ultimately financed the production, and points out that freelance journalists do not ordinarily investigate a client's funding before accepting an assignment.

The physician who was not told

What happened to one of the interviewees shows what the instruction of 4 December meant in practice.

A South African physician working in medical cannabis describes in an email of 16 January 2024 how she spoke for three and a half hours about cannabis as medicine, about her patients and about her research. She was then called back. The reason given was that the person paying for the documentary wanted particular questions asked, about a named individual and a company said to have taken people's money.

Of her three and a half hours on medicine, nothing was used. What was cut out and circulated was the second round.

"This is a breach of my confidentiality, as I am now part of a video about some scam which has absolutely nothing to do with me."

Naidoo denied this in writing. In her response to Svenskhampa of 31 July 2026 she stated that she had provided the physician with no questions either before or after the interview, and that the questions she asked formed part of the interview itself.

After the contemporaneous correspondence was put to her she confirmed that the team returned to the physician, that this happened at Alex Hilton's request, and that the questions concerned a person he identified as involved in fraud. She says she put them in her capacity as interviewer, that they were not her initiative, and that her earlier statement was incomplete because two and a half years had passed.

What she first stated, and what she later confirmed

That is not the only point on which her first response was incomplete.

Svenskhampa put the specific matters to Naidoo in writing on 31 July 2026. She replied the same day, at length, and expressly disputed two things among others.

She disputed that she had given the physician any questions outside the interview. And she disputed that participants had been instructed not to mention JuicyFields, on the contrary, she said, she had raised JuicyFields in the interviews herself.

The first statement was contradicted by material in her own correspondence. The second requires a distinction. The correspondence shows that she was initially instructed not to raise JuicyFields; the film shows that she raised it anyway. That she raised the subject was therefore correct. What her first response did not disclose was that an instruction to the contrary had existed.

That instruction says something about the assignment itself. The man she was sent to ask about was JuicyFields' former chief executive. The job therefore concerned the company's most senior figure, while the company's name was not to be mentioned. That Naidoo named it anyway did not mean she introduced a foreign subject into the interviews, it meant she put a name to the business the man in question had run.

Presented with it, she has confirmed that the team returned to the physician at the client's request, and that she was initially instructed not to raise JuicyFields. She explains this by the passage of two and a half years, says the first response was incomplete rather than deliberately wrong, and adds, as to JuicyFields, that she later departed from the instruction because she judged the subject editorially relevant. The film shows that JuicyFields was raised in the interviews, which supports that part.

A third point remains irreconcilable without having been expressly disputed. Her response describes the commission as a documentary about the industry as a whole with a smaller focus on van der Merwe. The client's own messages are, from the first, about €3.5 million paid with nothing grown, and about the task of exposing a named individual. She says the production in practice became broader than the written brief.

Svenskhampa cannot determine whether the discrepancies arise from recollection at two and a half years' distance, from how the response was drafted, or from something else, and makes no claim about it. What is undisputed is that the first response was incomplete, and that it was completed once the documents were produced.

The physician was also told the film was an eNCA production. She writes in the same exchange: "I was told by Natalia it was an ENCA documentary and that was the only reason I agreed." Naidoo replied to her the same day that eNCA does not make documentaries, that she had never been engaged as an eNCA journalist, and that she had never mentioned either eNCA or Carte Blanche in connection with the project. The eNCA claim therefore came from the interpreter.

What the film became

Naidoo says she does not know whether the film was completed, by whom, under what title or where it was published.

Svenskhampa has it. It is in the editorial archive and has been transcribed locally. It runs thirty-three minutes and consists of five parts: a man introducing himself as JuicyFields' former head of security who sets out allegations against Willem van der Merwe; a meeting at which defrauded investors are offered a new deal of 280,000 cannabis plants for €5.5 million; an affected investor describing a trip to South African cultivation sites; van der Merwe himself, in what appears to be a recording made without his knowledge; and finally the interviews.

In the last part four industry figures take part, all named on screen. Several are asked the same three questions in substance, though the wording varies: have you heard of this person, have you heard of this company, have you done business with them. All answer no.

In one of the interviews the JuicyFields question is put at 30 minutes and 11 seconds into the film. The question about Dacha Africa Holding and its director William follows thirty-five seconds later, at 30 minutes and 46 seconds.

That is exactly what the instruction of 4 December ordered.

Who distributed the material

At 03:47 on 14 January 2024 an email went out to journalists who had written about JuicyFields. The sender was "JuicyFields DAO team", press@juicyholdings.com. The subject line was "The truth is out there".

The email contains two file links and describes the contents as notes from a meeting with "Mr. Willem" in Zurich together with "the raw material for a forthcoming film". It continues: "We're working on this video with African journalists, we're not stuck, and we're looking for the end of this tangled tale." It closes by saying the senders hold material on a named lawyer and a company, and intend to keep asking uncomfortable questions.

The raw material from the production was therefore distributed by JuicyFields' own organisation, to the press, two days before the physician made contact.

Presented with this by Naidoo, Alex Hilton said he knew nothing about it and asked where she had seen the video.

The man the film named

Willem van der Merwe, the man Hilton's messages call William throughout, was listed as JuicyFields' chief executive and is said to have resigned in mid-July 2022, days after the platform shut down and the money disappeared.

Here this investigation has to contradict its own natural conclusion.

It would be easy to describe van der Merwe as an innocent victim. Svenskhampa does not, because that is not what the evidence supports.

Sunday World reported on 28 April 2024 that van der Merwe and two associates face allegations of fraud concerning some €3.5 million, around 70 million rand. According to the paper a fraud case was registered at Diep River police station in Cape Town on 15 April 2024. The allegation is that funds investors paid into his company Dacha Corporation were instead moved on to his wife's account.

There is no conviction. The allegations are untested, and van der Merwe is to be regarded as innocent unless the contrary is established.

Sunday World names two further people in the same connection. The same two names occur in the third part of the film, where an affected investor describes how the delegation was met at the airport by a man holding a Dacha sign, and who arranged the visits to the cultivation sites. Svenskhampa does not name them here. They have had no opportunity to answer anything.

One of the two also appears on Dacha's own website, which until the spring of 2024 carried a page listing the company's leadership. It is archived from 16 June 2021 and gives him as operations manager. The link to that page was still in the site's navigation on 19 April 2024, four days after the fraud case was registered at Diep River, and was gone by 25 May 2024. The page has not returned.

But it explains why the arrangement could work. A diversion works best when it points at someone already exposed. That van der Merwe was a credible target did not make him a less useful one, it made him a better one. The question is not whether he is innocent, but why the person who commissioned the film already knew what the interviewees would say.

Part two: the journalist who made both

What follows is different material, by a different person, with no established connection to the one above.

The affidavit

On 6 February 2024 City Press, published by News24 in South Africa, ran the article "Russian investigator abducted while probing missing cannabis money in SA, Namibia". It is written by Nkululeko Ncana, a South African freelance journalist.

The article is built on an affidavit given to Namibian police by a Russian national described as an investigator. It presents him as the victim, abducted and extorted, and identifies van der Merwe as the man around whom the missing money turns.

The man in the affidavit is the same person who opens the film in part one. That says nothing about how the article came about.

He was JuicyFields' head of security, and later became the central whistleblower in Danmarks Radio's documentary Den russiske insider in November 2024, the film which, together with the rest of the consortium's publications, tied the fraud to Russian organised crime.

The channel that spread it

Sixteen days later, on 22 February 2024, the article was posted in the JuicyFields Telegram channel, which at the time had around 1,400 subscribers, largely defrauded investors.

"Another interesting fact, thanks to the e-growers who keep us informed."

A Russian-language version of the same content was published the same day, 22 February 2024, on the site fishki.net, under the headline "Investigation into the cannabis fraud ended in an abduction". The account that posted it had been registered that same day. It carries the name Pyotr Bezukhov, the central character of War and Peace, and has no other posts.

On 5 March 2024 the same channel forwarded a film titled Budding Lies: Unmasking Cannabis.

"More interesting footage from independent journalists of South Africa."

The film runs eight and a half minutes and was uploaded on 2 March 2024, to the YouTube channel of the same Nkululeko Ncana who had written the City Press article just under four weeks earlier. It was therefore not published by News24, and Svenskhampa has not found it published by any newsroom. At the time of this investigation it had 437 views.

Three days after upload it sat in the channel through which the fraud's own organisation addressed the people it had defrauded, presented to them as material from independent South African journalists.

Two pieces on the same matter, just under four weeks apart, from the same pen, one in an established newspaper, the other on a personal YouTube channel. Both forwarded to the people who had been robbed by the organisation that robbed them, as evidence for that organisation's own account of where the money went.

Svenskhampa has not been able to establish how the affidavit reached Ncana, whether the same source lay behind both pieces, or whether anyone paid for either. Those questions have been put to him.

What the two parts say together

The commissioned film and Ncana's two pieces share a target, a period and one person. They do not share, so far as Svenskhampa has been able to establish, any client, any payment or any document. Nothing here suggests that News24 knew of the commissioned film, or that anyone in that newsroom acted other than in good faith.

What links them is simpler, and more uncomfortable.

In Cape Town, the form of journalism was commissioned as a disguise. The client set out the method in advance, knew the answer beforehand, and needed only real people's faces in front of the camera to make the conclusion credible.

And in both cases the result was the same. Material carrying a working journalist's name and an established newsroom's brand ended up, within weeks, in the hands of the victims, forwarded by the people who had taken their money, as proof that somebody else was to blame.

It is not enough that a production looks like journalism, if the person who commissioned it has already decided what it will show.

One of those engaged did eventually write five words in a chat window: we're not manufacturing the truth. It is the only sentence in the entire record in which anyone says no.

It stopped nothing. The material was already filmed and already handed over. The film was completed without her, and on 14 January the raw material went out to journalists from the fraud's own address. What an individual professional can refuse is their own further participation. The production no longer needed her.

That is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of the whole sequence. The system managed perfectly well without the person who said no.

Right of reply

Latashia Naidoo was put the details in writing on 31 July and, after further material emerged, again on 1 August 2026. She responded at length on both occasions and voluntarily supplied her correspondence with the client and with the physician.

She has corrected two statements from her first response. She first disputed that the team had given the physician any questions outside the interview, and then, presented with the correspondence, confirmed that the team returned to the physician at the client's request. She first disputed that participants had been instructed not to mention JuicyFields, and then confirmed that she was initially given that instruction, but says she departed from it because she judged the subject editorially relevant, which the film confirms she did. She explains both by the passage of two and a half years and says the first response was incomplete rather than deliberately wrong.

She disputes that she held herself out as acting for eNCA, that the production was an eNCA documentary, that the cameraman had any connection to it, and any suggestion that she knowingly took part in an effort to shape perceptions of JuicyFields. Svenskhampa publishes no claim about her motives, and has established that her account of her professional background matches public sources.

The passages concerning her were sent to her for factual review on 12 August 2026. She replied the following day with detailed objections, principally that the text in several places rendered Svenskhampa's interpretation as established fact. She objected in particular to wording that attributed to her control over what the participants answered, and to the statement that four interviewees were asked the same questions word for word.

Svenskhampa has tested those objections against the material. The statement about identical wording was wrong and has been corrected: the film shows the same three questions in substance, with varying wording. The characterisation of what she did not refuse, and other wording that went beyond what the material shows, has been removed. The corrections made were confirmed to her in writing. She has not approved the text, and her response should not be read as approval of its content or conclusions. Nor should the absence of any further reply from her be read as agreement.

Willem van der Merwe was put the details on 1 August 2026, that he is named in both productions, that he appears to have been recorded without his knowledge, and Sunday World's account of the complaint. The deadline has expired without a reply. A reply will be accepted and published after the date of publication.

The physician has been asked whether she wishes to appear by name, anonymised, or not at all. She is anonymised in this text.

The other participants in the film. The film names four interviewees on screen. Three of them have been asked how the production was presented to them. The fourth could not be reached, no public contact details could be found. None is named here without their own consent.

News24 was put questions on 31 July 2026 about how the affidavit article reached the newsroom, what verification was carried out, and whether the newsroom was aware that the JuicyFields channel had forwarded it. Those questions also covered Budding Lies, which was assumed at the time to be News24's own production. Svenskhampa has since established that the film sits on an individual journalist's YouTube channel, has not been able to tie it to News24, and has notified the newsroom of the correction in writing. The deadline has expired without a reply. A reply will be accepted and published after the date of publication.

Nkululeko Ncana was put questions on 7 August 2026 about Budding Lies: whether he produced the film himself, whether anyone commissioned or paid for it, whether it was offered to any newsroom before he published it on his own channel, and whether he knew it was circulated in the JuicyFields Telegram channel three days later. An earlier approach made through LinkedIn had gone unanswered.

After Svenskhampa subsequently established that he also wrote the City Press article of 6 February 2024, the matter was put to him again on 14 August 2026, with questions about how the affidavit reached him, whether the same source lay behind both pieces, whether the article was commissioned by the newsroom or offered by him, what verification was carried out, and whether he knew that the JuicyFields channel forwarded both. The deadline was set at 21 August 2026 and has expired without a reply. Svenskhampa makes no claim about him, not that he knew how the film came to be used, not that he knew who circulated it, and not that anyone paid for it. His reply will be received and published when it comes.

Alex Hilton and Natalia Mordvinova could not be reached. Naidoo says she no longer holds contact details for either, and that she never met Hilton in person.

Sources

• City Press/News24, "Russian investigator abducted while probing missing cannabis money in SA, Namibia", 6 February 2024: news24.com, the byline appears on the republication by the World Association of Professional Investigators, "Nkululeko Ncana – City Press": wapi.org
• Danmarks Radio, Den russiske insider, Mafiaens milliardbedrag, 10–11 November 2024: dr.dk
• Correctiv and others, the consortium's publication on JuicyFields, 8 November 2024: correctiv.org
• Europol, "9 arrests in EUR 645 million JuicyFields investment scam case", Operation Stoner, 11 April 2024: europol.europa.eu
• Global Investigative Journalism Network, biography of the journalist: gijn.org
• Sunday World, "Cannabis entrepreneur and associates face R70m fraud charges", 28 April 2024: sundayworld.co.za
• Vice, "The 'World's Biggest Cannabis Scam' Is Totally Unravelling", van der Merwe as JuicyFields' chief executive, resigning mid-July 2022: vice.com
• Sunday World, "Mashishi stubs out of dodgy cannabis project": sundayworld.co.za
• Budding Lies: Unmasking Cannabis, uploaded 2 March 2024 to the YouTube channel Nkululeko Ncana: youtube.com, the channel: @bornunstoppable45
• fishki.net, "Расследование аферы с коноплёй закончилось похищением", 22 February 2024: fishki.net, the account: Петр Безухов, registered 22.02.2024
• Internet Archive, dachacorp.com/meet-the-team, capture of 16 June 2021: web.archive.org, the navigation link is present in the capture of 19 April 2024 and absent from the capture of 25 May 2024

The client's written instructions, Naidoo's responses of 31 July, 3 August and 13 August 2026, her correspondence with the physician, the JuicyFields DAO circular of 14 January 2024, the transcribed film and the screenshots of the Telegram channel are held in the editorial archive.