South African insurance mogul Antonio Iozzo will sue the state after fraud charges are dropped

South African prosecutors have dropped the fraud case against Antonio Iozzo, the insurance entrepreneur, and he intends to sue the state over it.

The National Prosecuting Authority withdrew the charges on Tuesday against Iozzo, the Gauteng attorney Werner Roets and AJ van Rensburg, chief financial officer of Iozzo's Alpha Group. The three had been accused of using forged signatures and false documents to have three family trusts improperly removed from an umbrella investment trust, in a dispute involving roughly 800 million rand. They handed themselves in at Germiston police station with their lawyers and were released on 50,000 rand bail each.

Iozzo said the public places enormous trust in the South African Police Service, and that when the police publicly accuse people of serious criminal wrongdoing, the public and the media are entitled to assume those allegations have been checked, verified and supported by evidence. That, he said, is why what happened here is so serious.

He intends to bring a substantial damages claim against the state for the reputational and financial harm caused by what he called false and baseless statements published by the police, and to lodge separate perjury complaints against his older brother Nicola and against Gregory Hutchinson, a childhood friend. The feud between the three men has been running for some time.

Alpha continued operating normally throughout, he said.

The business he built is larger than the coverage of the case suggested. Iozzo founded Alpha in 2004 and it is now Africa's largest independently owned cell captive underwriting management agency, a structure in which a company manages insurance business on behalf of an insurer while ring-fencing the risk in a dedicated cell. It is licensed by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, employs more than 450 people, and says it protects assets worth over 3 trillion rand while managing about 3.5 billion rand in annual risk capital.

Alpha writes specialist property and motor cover for large South African corporates and state-owned entities, spanning property damage, business interruption, employee injury and legal liability. Iozzo has said the company works with clients on risk management, property valuations, fire regulations and sprinkler installation rather than simply setting compliance requirements and stepping back. It operates from Bedfordview in Gauteng, with offices in Scottburgh in KwaZulu-Natal and at Tyger Waterfront in Cape Town.

His route into insurance was unusual. He trained as a chef at Parktown College between 1994 and 1996 before studying short-term insurance through the Insurance Institute of South Africa, and founded Alpha alone.

The group has since widened well beyond underwriting. Iozzo founded Body Action Gym in 2021 and the rooftop restaurant and cocktail bar The 11th Floor in 2022, and owns Uber Property Developments. He was named GQ South Africa's Business Icon of the Year, reached the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finals in 2019 and 2021, and won the FNB Business Innovation Awards businessman of the year in 2013.

Neither the prosecuting authority nor the police has explained publicly why the charges were withdrawn, and a withdrawal does not prevent the state reinstating them.