SAMRO Told Members in 2023 Its Royalty Pool Had Fraud In It. It Took Until 2025 for Sony, Universal and Sheer to Be Named.

The Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO), the collecting society that pays out performance royalties on behalf of South African songwriters and publishers, told its own members in December 2023 that a forensic investigation had found fraudulent royalty claims inside the fund it uses to pay royalties nobody has formally claimed, the “undocumented works” pool. It took until September 2025, and reporting that quoted the forensic report directly, for the public to learn which publishers the report actually named: Sheer Publishing Africa, Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group.

No court has ruled on any of this. SAMRO itself has never released the underlying report, and says it cannot while a police investigation is open. This record sets out what SAMRO has confirmed in its own words, what the forensic report is quoted as saying, and the sizeable gap between the two.

What the pool is, and why it is worth fighting over

SAMRO licenses the public performance of recorded music, radio play, live shows, broadcast, on behalf of songwriters and composers, and distributes the royalties collected to the rights holder the use is matched to. Where SAMRO cannot match a use to a registered rights holder, the royalty sits in an “undocumented works” pool rather than going unpaid. Before 2020, only SAMRO’s larger publisher members, several represented on its own board, could see the list of undocumented works available to claim. In 2020, SAMRO opened a digital claim tool to all members.

SAMRO’s board ordered a forensic investigation into that pool in November 2022, after a multimillion-rand claim from Sheer Publishing Africa was flagged and intercepted before payment. SAMRO commissioned Fundudzi Forensic Services to carry it out. The firm’s managing director, Ernest Nekhavhambe, delivered the report to a small group of SAMRO board members and executives, including chief executive Annabell Lebethe, on 19 July 2023.

What SAMRO has confirmed, in its own words

SAMRO presented the report’s findings to members at its Annual General Meeting on 7 December 2023. Reporting on that meeting the next day quoted the board confirming “fraudulent activities by some of its members who made irregular royalty claims” and said a criminal case had been registered with the South African Police Service.

SAMRO did not name any company or individual at that point. It still has not. On 27 January 2025, after what it called “recent public interest” in the matter, SAMRO’s board issued a statement reiterating that the investigation had “revealed fraudulent activities by certain members, who are composers, authors, and publishers, in collusion with a former employee, which led to irregular royalty claims and payments.” Board chairperson Nicholas Maweni said SAMRO had taken “swift and decisive action,” that the case remained with the police’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (the Hawks), and that “the forensic report cannot be released at this time to ensure the integrity of the process and ultimate findings.” The January 2025 statement contains no rand figure and names no publisher.

What the report itself is quoted as saying

The specifics did not come from SAMRO. They came from reporting that quoted Fundudzi’s report directly, after what SAMRO’s COO Mpho Mofikoe raised at a members’ meeting that July and after SAMRO suspended her in August 2025. According to that reporting, the report states: “Members claimed a combined amount of R61,985,176 for the GY2020 to FY2022 period; of [that] R31,384,854 was paid by Samro.” It goes on: “There is no indication that [the] members [who were] paid submitted proof of copyright for the works claimed.” In the 2021/2022 financial year alone, SAMRO had declared R24 million worth of works “undoc,” according to the same report.

Figures vary slightly between outlets covering the same report, R60 million to almost R62 million claimed, R24 million to roughly R31.4 million paid out, and this record is not resolving that variance, because none of the outlets involved has published the report itself. What is consistent across every account is the mechanism: the report describes claims altered in subtle ways to misattribute authorship, or filed under obscure or generic titles designed to slip past review.

Who the report names, and what it does not establish

Sheer Publishing Africa, the company whose intercepted claim triggered the probe, is reported to have been recommended for criminal investigation over claims made between 2020 and 2022. The report traces a route into Sheer through Clint Louw, a SAMRO manager until his resignation in 2018, who was then recruited by Sheer figures David Alexander and Mandrew Mnguni to work as a consultant. Louw later worked for Sony Music Publishing, which the report also recommended for further investigation.

Louw is reported to have told investigators that while still at SAMRO, his outside client list included Alexander and Mnguni at Sheer, Rowlin Naicker at Sony Music Publishing and EMI, and Ryan Hill at Universal Publishing, a SAMRO board member. Reporting states that Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group were “collectively implicated to the tune of millions,” without a figure attributed to either by name, and that Hill did not respond to a request for comment. Sheer’s Alexander has disputed being a wrongdoer at all, telling investigators Sheer was itself defrauded because Louw abused his access to its systems to misdirect claims.

None of that establishes that Sony Music Publishing or Universal Music Publishing Group, as corporate entities, authorised or benefited from irregular claims; the report’s own language is a recommendation for further investigation of named individuals and their claim-year clients, not a finding against either major. Sony Music Publishing has said it will not comment while the matter is under investigation.

A company named in 2020-2022 conduct is not the company that exists today

Sheer Publishing Africa is the entity named throughout the reporting on this period. Since then, this desk has separately verified that Sheer rebranded to Downtown Music Publishing Africa in May 2025, several months after Universal Music Group completed its roughly $775 million acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings. That means the publisher most directly named in a 2020-2022 fraud investigation now trades, under a different name, inside Universal’s corporate family, a fact that appeared in none of the reporting on the SAMRO report this desk reviewed. It is not evidence that Universal inherited any liability for conduct that predates its ownership, and this record does not suggest otherwise. It is a fact worth knowing if you are trying to work out who actually administers a catalogue that passed through Sheer in those years.

Where it stands

SAMRO says the matter sits with the Hawks. When The Citizen asked SAPS and the Hawks to confirm an open case, neither could do so without a case number, which SAMRO did not provide. SAMRO’s COO remained suspended as of the most recent reporting found for this record, having challenged the suspension at the CCMA; SAMRO says the suspension is unrelated to her raising the report with members. Board chairperson Nicholas Maweni resigned in 2025 after members protested outside a SAMRO event demanding the full report be published. No source reviewed for this record, up to its publication date, reports the report itself being released, a prosecution being brought, or a recovery of the disputed payments being completed.

What this means for artists

An “undocumented works” pool exists at every collecting society that pays by matching usage to a registered owner: money for a radio play or a sync nobody has claimed does not vanish, it sits waiting. That makes it a standing target, and SAMRO’s own quoted report found that claims against its pool were paid out with no proof-of-copyright requirement enforced. For any African songwriter whose catalogue has ever run through a large publisher’s administration, the practical lesson is not to assume a collecting society has verified a claim before paying it. Register your works directly with your PRO under your own name, keep your own proof of authorship, and ask your society, in writing, whether any of your titles have ever appeared on an undocumented-works list. If SAMRO’s experience is any guide, the gap between a claim being paid and a claim being proven can run for years, and the only people who tend to close it are the rights holders who ask first.

This record will be revisited if SAMRO releases the report, if SAPS or the Hawks confirm a case, or if any named party responds with a document of its own.