By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) has filed a criminal complaint against the Deputy President David Mabuza with the NPA’s Investigating Directorate.
It accuses Mabuza of being involved in a R35bn land claims scam.
Outa wants the NPA’s Investigating Directorate to probe charges of organised crime under the Prevention of Organised Crime Act (Poca) against 13 individuals, including Mabuza, and two businesses, as suspects in criminal networks, including a “land claims scam” and the killing of wildlife.
According to an article on the Daily Maverick, the allegations go as far back as 2002 to the present-day.
OUTA CEO Wayne Duvenage said: The land restitution scam involved buying up farms and acting as middlemen masquerading as farm owners, selling the farms at vastly inflated profits to the Mpumalanga Regional Land Claims Commission. [They] claimed the costs from the national Department of Land Affairs, supposedly for communities of thousands of land ‘claimants’, even though no legal claims were registered for those farms.
He added that some of the “claimants” had not benefitted from the claims despite the number of applications exceeding the population size.
Duvenage said wildlife was killed through the sale of hunting permits “to the highest bidder”.
“The Fund ran a bank account outside the controls of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) with no oversight. Wildlife Protection Services (WPS) employees decided which animals were problem animals, issued hunting permits to the highest bidder, and paid the proceeds into the Fund,” said Duvenage.
The suspects are accused of a long list of alleged crimes, including theft, fraud, defeating the ends of justice, perjury, contempt of court, intimidation and extortion, among other charges.