JOHANNESBURG, May 10: Nelson Mandela has filed a lawsuit to stop a former confidant and his businessman associate from “pursuing a secret agenda” and selling millions of dollars of fake artwork portraying his prison years, his lawyer said Tuesday. Mr Mandela, in the court papers, accused his ex-lawyer Ismail Ayob and Ayob’s business associate Ross Calder, of stabbing him in the back.

Mr Mandela said Ayob “has acted in a duplicitous and mala fide manner, leading me to believe that he would comply with my wishes and requests while pursuing a separate and secret agenda,” a source said.

The elder statesman, who turns 87 in July, said that “having regard to my age ... it is my wish that my personal assets and those in the trusts ... are controlled and administered by persons of goodwill and highest integrity.” The anti-apartheid icon, who spent a total of 27 years in jail, decided after his release in 1990 to collaborate with “an artist to produce limited edition paintings which he signed,” Bizos said.

The venture by South Africa’s first black president was essentially aimed at raising funds for charities bearing his name. Bizos said Mandela had stopped signing the artworks soon after in the hope that all the copies would be exhausted but it emerged from sources all over the world that Calder and Ayob had “mechanically and photographically reproduced innumberable copies which are being sold at exorbitant prices.—AFP