Must-watch trailer: The People vs VBS explores South Africa’s biggest bank heist

Showmax has just dropped the trailer for The People vs VBS, IdeaCandy’s true-crime documentary series about “South Africa’s biggest bank heist” – allegedly orchestrated by the bank’s own executives.

With court proceedings still unfolding eight years after the collapse, The People vs VBS revisits a scandal that remains far from resolved.

In the documentary, News24 investigative journalist Kyle Cowan recalls his first reaction to the story. “We were, like, ‘But that's impossible. No one can steal R1 billion and no one notices.’” Except, apparently, they can – and it was actually nearly double that.

Watch the trailer for The People vs VBS

Screening over two Wednesdays on Showmax from 25 March 2026, the four-part Showmax Original is directed by Richard Finn Gregory and produced by Elle Oosthuizen and Wim Steyn. Gregory and Oosthuizen were named the Sanlam Group Financial Journalists of the Year in 2022 for Steinheist. They were also behind the 2025 International Emmy nominee School Ties.

Imagine waking up to find your life savings are gone forever. According to VBS liquidator Walter Stander, that’s what happened to an 86-year-old woman, who’d saved R650 000 over 30 years as “a nest egg for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to go to college.” She lost it all in 2018, as did many others from rural and low-income communities.

“We had 22 000 depositors, effectively, and these are individuals who deposited their life savings and monies into the bank, only for this to be siphoned by a few executives,” says VBS liquidator Anoosh Rooplal. 

“What kind of man can do that to poor villagers?” asks local documentary filmmaker Dowelani Edward Nenzhelele, whose own family lost hundreds of thousands of rands. 

The documentary suggests the answer is unsettlingly simple: more than a few. 

The People vs VBS follows the money to show how a small mutual bank became entangled with multinational auditors, political parties, a royal household and a former president.

“This was the most powerful people in South Africa coming together to rob a bank,” says investigative journalist Qaanitah Hunter.

Many South Africans first became aware of VBS in 2016, when the bank loaned then-President Jacob Zuma over R7 million to pay back the money for the non-security-related upgrades to his Nkandla homestead – more than the bank’s annual net profit at the time.

The Venda Building Society was formed in 1982. The pioneering black-owned bank played a key role in development finance in South Africa, offering microloans and joint accounts for burial societies and stokvels.

“It’s a model that should’ve been replicated across South Africa,” says News24 investigative journalist Sikonathi Mantshantsha. “The democratic government should have learned important lessons in development finance from what VBS achieved.”Instead, after a change in leadership, the bank allegedly began operating like a pyramid scheme.

“A lot of the money was squandered,” says Stander, pointing to Ferraris and other extravagances, as well as bribes. “It wasn't stolen with the idea of safekeeping and building a nest egg. I assume their view was that this would just be the gift that keeps on giving.”

That required money to keep coming in faster than it went out: a classic Ponzi scheme problem. The mutual bank began chasing bigger and bigger paydays, shifting its focus from microloans to municipalities and eventually state-owned enterprises.

When VBS started missing payments and was placed under curatorship in March 2018, it triggered widespread panic. 

“People would queue and sleep outside the bank until they announced there was no more money in the bank,” remembers Limpopo resident Agnes Thivonali Ngobeli. 

The documentary includes interviews with:

• VBS co-founder Madambi Muvhulawa
• Lesetja Kganyago, governor of the South African Reserve Bank
• Former Public Investment Corporation CEO Dan Matjila
• Julius Malema, founder of the Economic Freedom Fighters
• Award-winning investigative journalists like Dewald van Rensburg, who wrote the book on the case, VBS: A Dream Defrauded
• Pauli van Wyk, who co-wrote the book Malema: Money. Power. Patronage

Allegations in the documentary include R5 million in cash leaving VBS in a bag by helicopter; a mayor asking for “Christmas presents”; and the assassinations of whistle-blowers.

“This is a cautionary tale about what happens when a legitimate desire for progress – to take a bank into the modern era – gets hijacked by compromised individuals,” says Gregory. “The money at stake was just too big for people to resist and, ultimately, the victims were those who needed VBS the most: the rural villagers of the vhaVenda community.”

After premiering on Showmax on 25 March, The People vs VBS will screen on M-Net (DStv Channel 101) at 10PM on Thursdays from 2 April.