On Wednesday (28/10), the Bloemfontein Magistrates’ Court postponed the Nulane corruption case to 20 January for a pretrial conference at the Bloemfontein High Court, said NPA national spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago. The eight accused include so-called Gupta lieutenant Iqbal Sharma, his company Nulane Investments, former Free State department of agriculture head Peter Thabethe, former department head Limakatso Moorosi, and former chief financial officer Seipati Dhlamini.

Also accused are Ronica Ragavan and Islandsite Investments, a company owned by the Gupta family that she represents, as well as Dinesh Patel, Sharma’s brother-in-law.

The case was reinstated on 4 June by Idac following the Supreme Court of Appeal’s decision to overturn the Free State High Court ruling that acquitted all the accused after they brought a Section 174 application for the case to be struck off the roll.

The accused are alleged to have acted in common purpose in the irregular payment of R24.9m by the Free State department of agriculture to Gupta-linked Nulane Investments.

The company was appointed to conduct a feasibility study for the department’s flagship Mohoma Mobung project, which ultimately led to the establishment of the Vrede/Estina Dairy Farm project. Investigations found that Nulane subcontracted Deloitte to conduct the feasibility study for R1.5m, significantly less than the R24.9m it had received from the department.

The case was previously dismissed in April 2023 when Judge Nompumelelo Gusha acquitted all the accused. In a strongly worded judgment, she criticised the police investigation into allegations of fraud, corruption, and money laundering, describing it as a “comedy of errors of the millennium” because of the handling of evidence.

Gusha had also delivered a scathing assessment of the prosecution team, led by advocates Peter Serunye and Jacyntha Witbooi. In her 39-page judgment, she found that the state had failed to meet even the most basic evidentiary threshold and ruled that the application for discharge could not be refused.

The judge was particularly critical of the testimony of state witness Shadrack Cezula, who testified under Section 204 of the Criminal Procedure Act. She declined to grant him indemnity, finding that he had failed to incriminate himself in the alleged wrongdoing linked to the Estina-related matter, as required by law.

During the original trial, the court heard that millions of rand allegedly looted from the Free State department of agriculture could not be fully traced because the funds had moved through multiple bank accounts.

Senior NPA financial investigator and former Hawks commercial crime investigator Thesele Rankuoatsana testified that funds transferred to Islandsite Investments became mixed with other money in the company’s accounts.

The prosecution also called retired Absa banking specialists Linda Channing and Norman Percival Smit, both of whom had more than four decades of experience in the banking sector. Channing explained how banking management systems operate and testified that Gupta family member Atul Gupta was the super user of Sahara Computers’ banking platform.

OFM News/Kekeletso Mosebetsi cvs

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