The chief executive of Africa Bitcoin Corporation, the JSE-listed company formerly known as Altvest Capital, has been debarred by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and has resigned from the board.
Warren Wheatley, who founded the company and drove its pivot into what it bills as Africa’s first listed bitcoin treasury company, is one of three people named in FSCA decisions communicated to the board on 30 August. The others are chief investment officer Akshay Karan and Tatum Wheatley, who heads the company’s media and investor relations.
According to an investor statement issued after markets closed on Tuesday, the decisions include debarment orders restricting the three from providing or being involved in the provision of financial products or financial services, from acting as key persons of financial institutions and from providing services to financial institutions.
The regulator has not published the decisions and the company has not said what conduct led to them. The investor statement, issued via the JSE, said the decisions were communicated confidentially to the individuals concerned.
All three dispute the findings and intend to apply to the Financial Services Tribunal for reconsideration and suspension of the orders. No suspension has been granted, so the debarments are in force.
Africa Bitcoin noted that the FSCA made no finding against any company in the group, and imposed no administrative penalty or debarment on any group entity. The orders apply to the three individuals alone.
Wheatley and Karan were placed on precautionary leave from their executive roles with effect from 31 August, initially for one month and subject to board review. During that period neither will exercise any authority on behalf of the company or represent it. Tatum Wheatley’s services, provided through her consulting business, have been suspended.
Stafford Masie takes the reins
Stafford Masie, an executive director and the company’s director of bitcoin strategy, has taken over as interim CEO with immediate effect. He will oversee the group’s executive arrangements relating to Altvest Credit Opportunities Fund, the wholly owned SME lender whose economics underpin the company’s preferred C ordinary shares, without joining that company’s board.
Masie is one of the better-known figures in South African technology. He was Google’s first country manager in South Africa, founded payments start-up Thumbzup and has served on the boards of Discovery Bank and Advtech. He joined Altvest as lead independent director, became executive chairman in September 2025 when the bitcoin strategy was announced and later moved to the bitcoin strategy role.
Masie told TechCentral by phone on Wednesday that he cannot comment publicly yet beyond the company’s investor statement. He also said Wheatley would not be commenting yet.
Wheatley resigned as a director of Africa Bitcoin Corporation with effect from 31 August. He, Karan and Tatum Wheatley all resigned as directors of Altvest Credit Opportunities Fund on the same date. The board described the measures as precautionary and non-disciplinary, and said they do not amount to a view on the merits of the FSCA findings.
Altvest Capital was built as a financing and financial services group for small and medium businesses, with Altvest Credit Opportunities Fund as its lending arm.
In February 2025, it bought a single bitcoin, describing the purchase as a systems test, and became the first listed company in Africa to adopt bitcoin as a primary treasury reserve asset. In September that year it proposed the name change to Africa Bitcoin Corporation and set out plans to raise up to US$210-million to buy bitcoin, explicitly modelling itself on Michael Saylor’s Strategy and Japan’s Metaplanet.
The accumulation has been modest against that ambition. The company held 4.5504 bitcoin by February 2026 and 5.5331 bitcoin after a purchase on 27 May 2026, the latter funded through an expansion of a secured lending facility backed by its existing coins. It moved from AltX to the JSE main board in May 2026 following a sub-division of its ordinary share capital, and has since added listings or quotations on A2X, Namibia’s NSX, the US OTCQB market and Deutsche Börse. An admission to London’s Aquis exchange has been pushed back.
The shares are thinly traded, which leaves the price vulnerable to sharp moves on small volumes. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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