The South African task force seeking billions of dollars from foreign companies alleged to have bolstered white apartheid rule could soon add Royal Dutch Shell to their action, a task force spokesman said on Thursday.

John Ngcebetsha of the Apartheid Claims Taskforce told Reuters lawyers would cite oil giant Shell, alleged to have helped white-ruled South Africa circumvent an anti-apartheid oil embargo, next.

“We have filed against seven companies and corporations so far and, in the next few weeks, probably before August 9, we will file against another two or three companies including Royal Dutch Shell,” Ngcebetsha said.

U.S. class action lawyer Ed Fagan, who won billions on behalf of victims of the Nazi holocaust, is scheduled to go to court for the first time in this case in New York on August 9.

Fagan will seek an order to preserve evidence in corporate files of complicity in the racist system.

Ngcebetsha said lawyers, churches and civic groups met in Johannesburg on Thursday to assess progress in their class action suit on behalf of millions of blacks.

“It was resolved that claims against banks, companies and corporations that profiteered from apartheid should go ahead in a more united way in the future,” he said.

He said the groups would ask Dumisa Ntsebeza, the labour court judge who headed the enquiry into apartheid atrocities by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to coordinate the South African team in the case.

Tutu’s commission probed apartheid’s history and recorded hundreds of human rights violations, mainly against blacks, but was not empowered to award financial reparations to victims.

“We should ensure that the process is South African-led and that no one personality should take the spotlight away from the cause itself and the victims of apartheid,” Ngcebetsha said.

Fagan told Reuters in July that the case could involve dozens of companies that continued to invest in South African during apartheid, defying international sanctions.

He said the process could win reparations of up to $100 billion for the black victims.

U.S. lawyer Michael Hausfeld, who has worked with Fagan on some cases and has a similar track record of class actions on behalf of victims of war and racism, arrived in South Africa on Wednesday to explore a similar action.

“What is probably one of the grossest violations of human rights was imposed by apartheid. It left a wake of victims that have never been accounted to by those who assisted and furthered the commission of the crime,” he told Reuters.

Hausfeld said he was talking to South African lawyers and groups about alternatives to a class action in a U.S. court.

Brendan Boyle,  Reuters, August 1, 2002