By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Five of the accused in the Nulane R24.9m fraud and money laundering trial told the Free State high court on Thursday that they will be applying for charges against them be discharged.
In the dock are Peter Thabethe, the former head of the Free State Department of Agriculture and Rural Development; Limakatso Moorosi, a former accounting officer at the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development; and Seipati Dhlamini, the former chief financial officer of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
The other accused are Iqbal Sharma, a high-flying businessman and former senior official in the Department of Trade and Industry; Dinesh Patel, Sharma’s brother-in-law and a representative of Sharma’s company Nulane Investments 204; and Ronica Ragavan, a long-time Gupta enterprise employee and director of Islandsite Investments One Hundred and Eighty.
Heads of arguments for the discharge application will be filed by Monday; accused say the state has no prospect of securing convictions.
During the trial,the court heard on Wednesday that state will no longer pursue evidence obtained from the #GuptaLeaks emails.
State prosecutor Peter Serunye told the court that the state was closing its case and would call no more witnesses.
Our evidence is sufficient, in our view. The state will then close its case,” Serunye told the court.
A trial-within-a-trial was anticipated after the state was forced last week to stand down a witness who would have given evidence of documents obtained from the #GuptaLeaks.
It is unclear how this move will impact on future cases in relation to evidence obtained from #GuptaLeaks.
Serunye had indicated the state would oppose the trial-within-a-trial.
The Judge has ruled all the disputed documents in this case are inadmissible as evidence – after slamming the state for failing to prove their authenticity, originality.
The companies indicted are Nulane Investments 204 and the Gupta-owned Islandsite Investment One Hundred and Eighty, which is in business rescue.
The case is based on an alleged corrupt contract in which R24.9-million was paid by the Free State provincial government to Nulane Investments to conduct a feasibility study for the province’s flagship Mohoma Mobung project, on the basis that Nulane had unique skills to perform the work.
The controversial Vrede dairy project was one of the programmes included in the Mohoma Mobung project.
Sharma was the sole director of Nulane Investments — the company that landed the R24.9-million contract in the Free State in 2011. The State contends that there was no valid reason the due diligence agreement could not have been procured on the open market as the services offered by Nulane were neither “unique” nor “innovative”.
Additionally, the State alleges that Nulane Investments had no employees on its books, and Sharma is accused of having outsourced the service to Deloitte for a fee of R1.5-million — a fraction of what the provincial government paid to the company. Sharma then allegedly entered into another subcontract for exactly the same services, this time with a Gupta-linked company, Gateway Limited in Dubai.
Nulane’s subcontract with Gateway, the State contends, was a carbon copy of the one it entered into with Deloitte. The State maintains that this subcontract was merely a means to launder Free State government funds to the Dubai company for the ultimate benefit of the Guptas.
Once paid to Nulane, the majority of the cash was allegedly laundered and diverted through a scheme of transactions into and through different bank accounts and Gupta-linked entities.
The R24.9-million Nulane Investments case, which saw the arrest of Sharma and several others in connection with a dodgy Free State government deal and for which they are now standing trial, is an important precursor to the Vrede Dairy Project case.
The charges pertain to the Vrede Dairy Project scandal, in which the Free State government unlawfully paid the Gupta family’s company Estina more than R280-million for a project that sidelined the intended beneficiaries — small-scale black farmers in the province.
The Gupta brothers — Rajesh and Atul — fled South Africa in 2018 and were arested in Dubai in June last year.