Anton Alberts (lawyer)

Anton Alberts is a South African lawyer with Alberts Bekker Vorster Pillay & Associates (ABVP) of Pretoria, which provides professional legal and financial advisory services to its mainly corporate clients. Alberts is an ABVP director who specialises in media, entertainment and international law.

Student and teacher

Anton Alberts studied law at the University of Johannesburg graduating with a bachelor’s degree, and a master’s degree in international law (cum laude). He has published a number of legal works, including the entertainment law edition of LexisNexis’ "forms and precedents", a chapter in the Internet law publication Cyberlaw, and a chapter in South Africa’s first telecommunications law text book "Telecommunications Law in South Africa".

His teaching career started as a lecturer in criminal, corporate and international law at Technikon SA (now part of the University of South Africa) and continued at Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg).

Business career

Alberts was appointed head of legal affairs for M-Net (Africa’s largest pay-TV operator), and later became legal manager at Internet Solutions (part of Dimension Data PLC). Appointments with Shaw Communications LLP (Canada’s second-largest television and Internet company) and with Mobile Data Solutions Incorporated (a Vancouver-based ICT firm) followed, before he became an ABVP director.

Claim to fame

In September 1999, Anton Alberts attended a hearing of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into the 1982 bombing of the ANC's offices in London (for which apartheid-era superspy, Craig Williamson, and seven former agents of the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) applied and were granted amnesty). Speaking after the amnesty hearing, Alberts told the "woza" news agency: "If you look at the Lockerbie disaster - this is very similar. I think Britain would like to see these guys are prosecuted in England even though they get amnesty here."