The sole director of Silver Tree cannabis farm, Simphiwe Yako was a former middle level Land Bank manager involved in structured black empowerment deals and leveraged finance. It appears that he conceptualized  Silver Tree cannabis farm during his final year at the Bank in 2020.

Was Yako the recipient of BEE funding deals he was working on at the Land Bank?

This has emerged from his various Linked-In profiles in which he describes himself as an ‘agri-entrepreneur’ with a decade’s worth of  commercial banking experience, and involved in the ‘transition’ of various agricultural companies.  

His profile says he worked at the Land Bank between 2016 and 2020 and was “part of the Land Bank Corporate and Structured Investments team” with a client base of listed and non-listed agricultural companies. He said his “transactional scope included but was not limited to debt finance, equity finance, mezzanine finance, BBBEE empowerment transactions, leverage finance as well as M&A transactions.”

All well and good so far, but in Silver Tree Farm’s Linked-In profile it claims that the company was “conceptualized and founded in 2019 by the directors and shareholders, having seen an opportunity in the cannabis sector”. By his own admission therefore, Yako conceived the Silver Tree ‘vision’ while he was still gainfully employed by the Land Bank.

Yako left the Land Bank in 2020, the year it went into default, requiring some R10 billion in taxpayer support to bail it out to the point where by September 2024 it had managed to reduce its debt from R40 billion to R16 billion, according to Business Live.

On Linked-In, Yako says that after Silver Tree was conceptualized “it went through various iterations and changes until the current model was adopted and implemented in 2021”.

Silver Tree says it's licensed, SAHPRA says it's not

It says that Silver Tree is curretly “a licensed cGMP cannabis cultivation and processing facility with the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (“SAPHRA”), with Silver Tree having successfully met the licensing requirements”.

But Silver Tree has no SAHPRA Section 22 medical cannabis license according to the list of SAHPRA-licenced cannabis cultivators . And neither does it have any background in cannabis training, according to Linked In. It has no web-site or contact details.

Despite this Yako appears to have managed to fairly rapidly convince both the Gauteng Agriculture Department and the Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme CASP) that Silver Tree was fit for purpose as a player in the cannabis business and succeeded in raising R20 million from them.

This was confirmed in the Gauteng legislature recently by Agriculture MEC Vuyiswa Ramokgopa who said that CASP provided the funds for Silver Tree in terms of an MoU signed in the 2023/4 financial year.

This means that by the time the DA visited Silver Tree farm at Tarlton the West Rand at the end of April 2025, and found ‘no evidence of economic activity or training’, the money was probably three years gone.

DA should 'connect the dots'

The DA’s Bronwynn Engelbrecht is to take up the search for the missing cannabis millions with Ramokgopa’s department, but she she should go further and probe the personal links between Simphiwe Yako, CASP’s Elder Mtshiza and Ramokgopa herself and find out who actually signed off on the deal and what supporting documentation there was.

What is alarming is that Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen said as recently as last month that the Land Bank and CASP are at the core of funding the hemp sector going forward and that how money was spent would be closely monitored.

A rudimentary online search shows that Silverleaf is inherently unsuitable for training the 200 farmers it received the money to. It has only one director, Simphiwe Yako, and is listed as having either one or three employees, depending on the search. A Google search for Yako leads to his Linked-In pages where he describes himself as:

Simphiwe Yako’s Linked In Profile:

Agri-prenuer and Agri-Finance professional with a passion for development and start-up. I started my career in banking and finance working in corporate, commercial, investment banking and advisory. A field I have been for over a decade. In more recent years, I have transition in the development and acquisition of various agricultural companies in South Africa, where our investment group is exposed agricultural machinery, vegetable production and vegetable packaging, agricultural training, cattle rearing and beef production, the planting and trading of grains and oilseeds, as well as the cultivation of medical cannabis.

Cannabiz Africa has not been able to contact Simphiwe Yako at the time of going to press and would welcome his perspective on this story should he contact us.

EDITORS NOTE:

THE Land Bank went into debt default in April 2020. The bank struggled to pay some of its debts, which caused one of the lenders to panic and demand an immediate repayment. The bank’s inability to repay the loan triggered a cross-default clause, leading to the default of the bank’s entire debt portfolio of R40 billion. Since then, it has reduced its debt obligations to just over R16 billion and, after four years of negotiations, a repayment plan was finally approved and implemented, effective 16 September 2024.

Themba Rikhotso, CEO of the Landbank, said in retropsective in Farmers Weekly in December 2024: that  “the biggest problem from a management perspective, in my opinion, was to outsource some of Land Bank’s core business, such as the origination, assessment and management of loans, to large co-operatives, many of which did things that were not part of the agreement.”

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