Lord Peter Hain, a former UK Cabinet minister with family links to South Africa, has called on the SA private sector to step up and find a role for whistleblower Athol Williams.

Speaking at the University of Pretoria's GIBS Business School on Wednesday, Hain said that Williams had shown "incredible bravery".

"Every South Africa business with any substantial activity should be ashamed of themselves."

Hain, whose family was forced to leave apartheid SA in the 1960s, has been meeting with Williams in the UK where he fled in November 2021 over fears for his safety.

"[Williams] got hounded out of the country, threatened with his life, and he is now jobless in the UK. We should all take responsibility for making contact with him … and find a role for him back in South Africa where he wants to be," he said.

Hain said it was a "stain" on the private sector and business lobby groups that they had stayed quiet. 

'There's no interest'

Williams, a former lecturer in business ethics at the University of Cape Town, was hired by the local office of Bain and Co. in late 2018 as an independent consultant to oversee its probe into Bain's work at the SA Revenue Service (SARS). 

He later worked as an independent advisor to help the consultancy develop a "remedy plan" and then served for five months on the group's African oversight board.

He abruptly quit his position in August of 2019, saying Bain had not been honest with South Africans and was not sincere about implementing his remedial plan.

Williams later gave evidence at the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture about links between Bain, former SARS boss Tom Moyane and ex-president Jacob Zuma. He fled the country in November 2021.

Speaking to News24, Williams said the SA businesses community had ignored him. 

"Not a single business leader or politician has offered support or even spoken publicly to condemn my treatment and commit to support. Does exposing state capture make me an enemy of the business community?

"I have written to CEOs and board chairmen but there's no interest," he said. "No one has any vacancies, not even non-exec [ones]."

While Bain has apologised for what it termed "lapses in leadership and governance", it has consistently denied "willfully or knowingly [supporting] state capture at SARS or elsewhere".

It has said that an internal report found no evidence it was involved in any scheme Moyane to damage SARS or that it withheld relevant evidence of any kind.

The consultancy, which was barred from tendering from state work last year, has also denied it tried to silence Williams after he left, saying that financial settlement and confidentiality agreements were "standard practice".