Our story
Thirty years of deal-making, applied to one stubborn problem.
Gareth Ochse and Des Mahony met climbing Kilimanjaro in 1996.
Two decades later they started working together on what seemed
a small question: why does nearly every B-BBEE ownership deal
in the South African market look overbuilt, underexplained,
and unloved by the people who have to live with it?
Both had already answered the question for themselves. Gareth
had put a B-BBEE ownership structure in place in a prior
business; Des had spent a long career in cross-border
investment banking navigating "citizen empowerment" rules in
markets north of South Africa. Between them they had seen
every structural pattern — which worked in practice, which
collapsed on the first verification, which triggered tax bills
nobody modelled properly.
Tusker was founded in 2017 as the answer. A discretionary
Category II FSP licence. Standardised legal templates for the
small-business end of the market; fully bespoke mandates for
corporates and multinationals. A single discipline: design the
ownership instrument properly, then manage it every year for
as long as the client needs it.
Nine years in, over R1.5 billion of client B-BBEE equity sits
under Tusker mandate. No client has ever left the firm. Every
year, every client, has passed verification cleanly. That is
the record. We'd rather let it speak than decorate it.
