The lawyer who led a successful campaign for Holocaust reparations will launch a courtroom battle in New York today to try to force several multinational corporations to pay up to $100bn (£65bn) to people who suffered under apartheid in South Africa.

The New Jersey lawyer Ed Fagan argues that his 1998 victory requiring Swiss banks to pay $1.25bn to survivors of Nazi concentration camps sets a precedent for the claim, filed on behalf of a group of 20,000 South Africans.

The companies targeted include Royal Dutch Shell, IBM, Citicorp, and two Swiss banks which he fought in the previous case, UBS and Credit Suisse. Royal Dutch Shell is accused of supplying the country’s former government with oil in defiance of international embargoes.

Among those listed as claimants is Sigqibo Mpendulo, an anti-apartheid campaigner whose twin 12-year-old sons were killed by a death squad in 1993 on the alleged authorisation of the then-president FW de Klerk, despite the fact that talks about the transition to democracy were apparently well-advanced.

Mr. Fagan’s publicity-seeking tactics, which have included media “roadshows” of Holocaust survivors and apartheid victims, have drawn criticism from some campaigners who fear that the lawsuit risks making them seem primarily bent on extracting large payments.

John Ngcebetsha, one of the lawyers on the case, cautioned: “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.”

Neville Gabriel, of the pro-reparations group Jubilee South Africa, said: “This is not a lottery where people can buy their ticket and expect to win. We have raised criticisms of lawyers who have given that impression.”

But the companies should be forced to pay, Mr. Gabriel said, “in order to engage them in an acknowledgment that what they did was wrong, that it should not have happened and should not happen again – in short, that crime does not pay, and that their profiting from apartheid has left persistent economic and social damage that needs to be repaired”.

The case, to be initiated in a Manhattan court today, seeks the establishment of a fund capable of making individual compensatory payments and broader social investments.

Some have argued the pursuit of payments is anathema to the principles embodied in South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the commission, supports the lawsuit.

“They should pay. They can afford it. And they should do it with dignity,” he told the Swiss magazine Facts last month.

“At the time, we called on the banks to give no more credit to the apartheid regime, but none of them listened to us. They said ‘business is business. Don’t talk to us about morality.’ They would have done business with the devil, too.”

Royal Dutch Shell said yesterday: “Shell South Africa vigorously denies any suggestion that the company was supportive of the apartheid regime in South Africa… Shell SA was vocal in its opposition to the apartheid system and publicly called for the lifting of all bans on political organisations and the release of political prisoners. The company also called for a free press, and the support of the universal declaration of human rights.”

Oliver Burkeman , Guardian (U.K.), August 9, 2002