Lawyer Pulls Plug on 'Earth Power Inventor'

Lawyer pulls plug on 'Earth power inventor'

By Johan Schronen The Somerset West "inventor" who made international headlines two years ago by asserting he could tap electricity from the Earth's magnetic field - and took up to R70 million from eager investors - has been charged with fraud.

It is alleged that the power actually came from simply tapping into the municipal supply.

To demonstrate his "revolutionary electro-magnetic power supply module", Bill Cronjé allegedly ran a secret power cable under his laboratory floor and up a table leg on which he placed the device.

Cronjé was arrested at his Somerset West home on Tuesday and appeared in the Somerset West Magistrate's Court yesterday.

He faces charges of fraud and offences under the Companies Act. He was granted bail of R100 000.

Commercial crime unit detectives submitted photographs and a sworn statement from an electrician who said he was ordered to cut a groove in the cement of a laboratory floor before it was tiled to hide an embedded wire.

The cable ran from the wall, secretly tapping the municipal electricity supply ahead of the factory's electricity distribution panel.

Newspaper reports at the time said it was either one of the world's greatest inventions or a swindle of breathtaking proportions.

At the time, the Scorpions briefly probed Cronjé to look after the interests of potential investors, but nothing came of the investigation.

Suspicions were again raised when a Milnerton advocate, Louis van Wyk, for the investors, ordered a private investigation into Cronjé's gadget, which he claimed "could dramatically change the way society generates electricity".

He had raised large sums of working capital on the strength of his invention.

Van Wyk and commercial detectives attended a meeting in Parklands last night where about 15 Cape Town investors, who had pumped about R9m over the past three years into the scheme, discussed the way forward. The main funder, and an inventor in his own right, Frank Taylor, is reported to have ploughed about R60m into the project.

Van Wyk said most of the smaller investors had handed over their life savings after Cronjé allegedly told them an American electricity supplier in Nevada wanted to import the modules, and that at least R200 000 was needed from each to build a factory to produce them. Some investors had paid much more.

When sister paper Weekend Argus approached Gridcon Power SA, the company behind the Cronjé scheme, in 2002, the firm said it was concerned about premature publicity having a negative impact on its plan to list the company on the stock exchange but eventually agreed to a reporter inspecting the supposed invention and laboratory.

At the time Cronjé, who had apparently registered four provisional patents involving a supposed unique process harnessing electricity from the electro-magnetic energy fields, was not willing to divulge details of the "sensitive" technology, citing fears of industrial espionage.

But he showed a reporter a row of brightly coloured devices with high- voltage warning signs on them and impressive-looking coils of electrical wire, magnets and other devices. Cronjé turned off the power at the mains and said the electro-magnetic module had no other power source. l Cronjé last year claimed he could extract not only pure drinking water but also gold and silver from sea- water with another invention, a desalination plant. He was seeking investors for the R1.5m project.