A man convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment by the Alex Magistrates’ Court intends hunting down an accomplice who seemingly disappeared after giving him a pittance from the spoils of their crime.
Read: Fraud suspect detained by security guards after attempting a misdemeanour
This emerged at the Alex Magistrates’ Court on 12 October when Magistrate Renier Boshoff sentenced Frederick Gouws of the Vaal.
Gouws was arrested on18 April in Midrand and claimed that a foreign national (Nigerian) co-conspirator lured him to defraud a company of R250 000 which was paid into their [Gouws and partner] company bank account.
The two of them duped the defrauded company by asking it to deliver pumps to Eskom as part of a lucrative tender they had won. To secure the work, the company had to pay them the R250 000 in advance. Soon after the money was deposited into their company account, most of it was withdrawn by Gouws’s partner.
Read: 1 arrested, 2 on the run after billing fraud
When their promise failed to materialise, the defrauded company instituted an investigation leading to Gouws’s arrest. In detention, he collaborated with investigators in tracing his partner in crime but they couldn’t find him which resulted in Gouws being convicted and sentenced alone. He has vowed that once he is released from prison to track down his partner.
