A BOGUS Margate ‘hotelier’ and his accomplice were convicted last Friday in the Ramsgate Regional Court on two charges of trafficking in humans for sexual purposes, keeping a brothel, procuring persons for purposes of prostitution and two charges of kidnapping.
Veeran Palan (33) and Edwina Bonita Norris (27), both of Sezela, will be sentenced on July 17.
They were acquitted on the main and alternative charges of conspiring with another to commit rape.
Regional Magistrate Johann Bester said that the state would have to prove that the customer, who had raped one of the women, and the two accused were all aware that she was not going to consent to have intercourse with the customer, that he would have to rape her and that they conspired with him in that regard.
“The evidence doesn’t allow for such inferences. The accused may have thought that the woman had by then acquiesced and decided to participate in prostitution. She had, after all, gone with him to the bedroom,” said Mr Bester.
Palan and Norris pleaded not guilty to the charges after they were arrested in Oslo Beach in 2013 after two women, aged 26 and 27 years, reported to the police that they had been lured to the South Coast from Cape Town with promises of employment.
Palan is believed to have pretended to be a hotel owner, while Norris had attended school with one of the women. The women were apparently promised work as a cleaner and waitress at Palan’s ‘hotel’ in Margate.
However, when they arrived, their ’employer’ allegedly told them that they had to perform sexual activities at a house in Seaward Lane, Oslo Beach.
Mr Bester said in his judgement that the two women did conceivably have opportunities to run off and seek help. But he take into account their vulnerability as they were in a strange place. They were also scared of their pimp and held in debt bondage.
“It is clear that they were being deprived of their free access to other people and this amounts to kidnapping,” he said.
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