By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Middelburg Specialised Commercial Crimes Court on Tuesday has struck the case against former Eskom boss Matshela Koko and others off the roll.
The court found that there had been unreasonable delays in the R2.2 billion corruption case against Koko and his co-accused.
The accused in the case include former SA Local Government Association (Salga) Chief Executive Thabo Mokwena, Eskom’s former interim Chief Executive, Matshela Koko, his wife, Mosima Koko, and Koko’s stepdaughters, Koketso Aren and Thato Choma, Eskom Project Director at Kusile (most senior on site) Hlupheka Sithole, Johannes Coetzee (lawyer) and Watson Seswai and Lese’tsa Johannes Mutchinya.
The judgment, however, is not a pronouncement of the innocence or guilt of the accused. The matter can be re-enrolled at a later stage if National Director of Public Prosecution, Adv Shamila Bathohi, wishes to do so.
This after multiple postponement requests from the National Prosecuting Agency (NPA), with the latest being for a four-month extension to complete the investigation.
In September, the prosecutor had told the court that the NPA still needed to conclude several witness statements with people based overseas. It also told the court that resource constraints had affected the case, making it difficult to conclude complex reports.
The defence took issue with the request and said the case should be struck from the court roll. Lawyers for the defence argued that the NPA had wasted time and arrested the accused too swiftly.
Magistrate Stanley Jacobs decided to conduct an inquiry which he said was a tool that “has reinforced the protection enjoined by our constitutional regime”.
Section 342A of the Criminal Procedure Act allows the court to “investigate any delay in the completion of proceedings which appears to the court to be unreasonable and which could cause substantial prejudice to the prosecution, the accused or his or her legal adviser, the State or a witness”.
“I need to acknowledge that it was quite a difficult application. It’s all about justice. It’s quite a difficult journey, the inquiry. I need to acknowledge the input you have made all made,” Jacobs said, addressing the lawyers in the case.
Jacobs said the delay requested by the NPA was unreasonable. He did not conclude reading his judgment, due to rolling power blackouts, choosing to rather summarise the decision after a two-hour delay.
He said a full written decision would be provided at a later stage.
After the judgment, Koko headed to X (formerly Twitter) to release a statement in which he referenced Psalm 91, “God is great, Always with Moses,” while saying “the past six years has been tragic”.
He labelled the Kusile matter a “hate crime” against him and his family, raking the NPA over the coals for “having done somebody a favour” with the case.
He also lashed into the African National Congress (ANC), calling the ruling party “a threat to the rule of law and the Constitution”.
“We must make 2024 better than 1994 by making NPA a Section 9 institution. The hyenas cannot look after the sheep,” Koko’s statement read.
The high-profile case has been making headlines since 2020 and relates to billions of rands worth of contracts for the construction of the Kusile Power Station, outside Emalahleni.
The contracts were awarded in 2015 to companies allegedly linked to Koko’s friends and family.
An investigation by the Specialised Investigating Unit (SIU) in 2020 found that the companies received overpayments amounting to R2 billion.