Corrupt late ANC MP owes state R1.1m, court rules

Not even in death has a corrupt politician, who scored big from signing off on contracts with a now convicted criminal, escaped the long arm of the law.

“In this case a bureaucrat who was a senior official in charge of public procurement was involved in bribery and corruption, resulting in the loss of billions of rands for the Northern Cape and the country,” Acting Justice Margie Victor said this week.

“While stories of the high-profile looters reach the media, the more low-key public officials who sit behind their desks committing acts of public procurement corruption with disturbing frequency may ultimately have an even greater catastrophic effect on our economy and society.”

She was handing down a scathing judgment on an appeal to the Constitutional Court in which the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) ended up with an order that the estate of the late ANC MP Yolanda Botha must cough up more than R1.1 million in ill-gotten gains, or risk falling under the hammer.

Botha succumbed to skin cancer in 2014, but in 2016, the National Director of Public Prosecutions secured a civil forfeiture order which ruled that renovations to her Kimberley home were deemed “the proceeds of unlawful activities”.

This followed an “adverse finding” against Botha, made after her death, in the criminal court, where she had been on trial for corruption alongside former Northern Cape finance MEC John Block and Trifecta property group director Christo Scholtz.

Block and Scholtz were jailed for money laundering.

The criminal court found that during her time as head of the Northern Cape’s social services and population development department, Botha had received R1,169,068.49 worth of kickbacks – including in the form of home renovations – for signing off on multimillion-rand leasing agreements between her offices and Trifecta.

On appeal, the civil forfeiture order was revised to reflect that an amount of R411,000 had already been paid back.

Botha at one time claimed she had repaid Trifecta this money in terms of what was, in fact, a loan agreement between the two. But Victor described it as part of “a sham designed to disguise the real relationship between Botha and Trifecta”.

She said: “It is a fallacy to consider Botha as having ‘repaid’ Trifecta. She was not repaying Trifecta. She was, rather, attempting to obfuscate the unlawful origin of the proceeds.”

She said the money was repaid as part of a carefully designed scheme “awash with criminal motive”. And she said to deduct it from the full amount would be to “give [Botha] credit for the fact that she tried to cover up the original wrongdoing.

“It will have the perverse effect of rewarding attempts to obfuscate corruption, directly contrary to the avowed aims of Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act.”

Botha’s executrix was ordered to pay the state the full amount within six months, failing which the auction of Botha’s home was authorised.

– bernadettew@citizen.co.za

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