What a mess the Guptas have left behind while they party at a family wedding in Turkey. Whether or not they come back, their South African story has become a vortex that sucks in lives and reputations and destroys them. SizweNtsalubaGobodo, South Africa's pre-eminent black-owned auditing firm, is now auditor to the Gupta's listed company Oakbay Resources, following the withdrawal of KPMG. You can rest assured that pressure was brought to bear. SNG needs the Gupta account like a hole in the head.But it is the external auditor for the Eskom group, a huge account by any standards, and the Guptas have their hooks well and truly into Eskom. In addition to its informal proxies on the board, just a few weeks after Mark Pamensky became an Oakbay Resources director, he popped up on the Eskom board as well. Nice.Capitalism worked like this in the 16th century. Wealth, exemplified back then by the Dutch East India Company, "is won and preserved with the support of a state that is, in turn, dependent on the riches accumulated by the few who excel in commerce", reads a recent article on the subject in the New York Review of Books.story_article_left1The article perfectly describes the relationship between one politically powerful family, the Zumas, and a wealthy merchant family, the Guptas."But always," the article reads, "the merchants grow rich because state power protects them or looks away when the time is right - and does so because in a world where commerce reigns, neither the state nor a powerful merchant class can exist without the other."That could apply in lots of places to lots of people, but for our purposes, it magnifies the ties between the president and the Guptas. Through them, President Jacob Zuma's son (read the Zuma family) has a major shareholding in coal mines that supply Eskom. Everyone makes money. What's wrong with that?What's wrong is that, to sustain the fiction that all of this is above board and perfectly reasonable, someone has to lie. For instance, the Guptas have just bought a big coal mine, Optimum, that supplies a major Eskom power station in Mpumalanga. Before that, Optimum was fined R2-billion by Eskom for supplying poor-quality coal. If Optimum's coal was inferior a year ago it probably still is, whoever the owner.Eskom says it is determined to exact the penalty. We will see. A R2-billion penalty would bankrupt the Guptas (and evaporate what capital the Zumas might have accumulated).Worse, on Thursday the government said a cabinet team had been formed to "resolve" the dispute between the Guptas and the country's big banks, all of which have closed the family's accounts.story_article_right2The assumption is that the banks have acted in concert against the Guptas. But they haven't. We already know that Absa, for instance, gave the Guptas 60 days' notice of its withdrawal of banking services, on December 18. Absa and the other banks are party to international banking agreements and individual correspondent agreements with foreign banks that oblige them to do clean business.The fact is, the writing has been on the wall for the Guptas for a long time. Nedbank pulled its business a long time ago. So did FNB. The family has had lots of time to pack.I would love to see Absa's written notice. The Guptas only announced a few weeks ago what they had known for three months. Why? We now have Gupta executives whining about the difficulty of paying their staff and other foolishness. Ignore them. They are lying. Heaven help their new auditors.There's no plot here. No banking plot, no white monopoly capital plot, or whatever other plot the crazies dream up. These banks and auditors and JSE sponsors have seen something that disturbs them and have acted to protect their businesses. People and firms have their accounts closed by South African banks all the time. They just don't run to the media with the news.The cabinet "team" is a waste of time and a smoke screen for a president scrambling desperately to deliver his part of his family's only real shot at serious wealth. And the more he struggles to make things right, the more visible becomes the rot - an archaic conjunction of a head of state and a rich family living off his clout and promising his family a cut in return...