Roger Kebble

Kebble was born on 9 November 1939 in Springs on the East Rand.^[1] After matriculating at St. Andrew's School, Bloemfontein, he began his career as an underground miner.^[1] He left the mine at the level of general manager and started his own mine contracting company with around R10,000 borrowed from his mother; in the 1980s, he sold the company to Gencor and took early retirement in Cape Town.^[1]

In 1991, however, he returned to the mining industry when he spent R40,000 to take over Rand Leases, a gold mine outside Johannesburg. In 1994, backed by Mercury Asset Management, he and his son Brett Kebble won a controlling interest in Randgold & Exploration, which they went on to unbundle into Harmony, DRDGold, and Randgold Resources.^[1][2] He became chairman of DRD, although he was subsequently sidelined in a public feud with Mercury's Mark Wellesley-Wood.^[1] In 2002 he was suspended from DRD and arrested by South African authorities on several counts of fraud and tax fraud. The fraud charges were struck off the roll in 2005,^[3] but the tax fraud dispute continued;^[4][5] it was still ongoing at the time of his death in 2015.^[1] He stepped away from his remaining executive positions, including his position on the board of Simmer and Jack,^[6] in the aftermath of Brett's death in 2005.^[7]

He was married to Julie Kebble until 2012, when they divorced.^[1] They had three children: Brett, Guy, and Alison.^[1][8] Suffering from depression,^[1] he committed suicide by gunshot on 24 August 2015; his body was found in his Mercedes-Benz in suburban Bishopscourt, Cape Town.^[9][10]