People: Frank talking from Lewis

Trenchantly spoken South African entrepreneur and company director Frank Lewis is planning his next corporate coup, the resurrection of AIM shell China Evoline. Lewis, who once built up South Africa’s leading computer retail chain and became ‘the Alan Sugar’ of the Republic before leaving for the UK, hopes to inject some Chinese mining assets into Evoline, which was floated three years ago as ZTC Telecommunications, a mobile phone handset maker in south China, before hitting the buffers.

ZTC’s former boss and majority shareholder and his brother-in-law, head of the company’s China operating arm, had gone missing after pledging ZTC shares as collateral for a personal loan. Lewis, who is a member of the AIM Advisory Group and has a clutch of smaller company directorships, grasped the nettle, building China Evoline out of the husk of ZTC, and has been trawling for deals.

No stranger to corporate dramas, a decade ago Lewis was chairman of AIM-quoted interactive TV company E-District, which became Yoomedia after he had discovered fraud and misrepresentation of accounts by previous management. The company is now audiovisual interaction specialist Mirada. He recalls that fund manager Patrick Evershed ‘put me in at Lloyds British testing’ to restore that company’s fortunes.   

Lewis, who is on the committee of the Quoted Companies Alliance, argues that non-executive directors still need to make themselves more effective: ‘There is a lot of cronyism with small and medium-sized companies and so the non-executive is either a cipher or a troublemaker.’