Former Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) chair Rubben Mohlaloga has slammed his conviction for money laundering and fraud linked to a R6m Land Bank scam as a “miscarriage of justice” that must be overturned.
Mohlaloga filed arguments at the Pretoria High Court on Monday, outlining the basis of his appeal against both the guilty finding made against him, in connection with the alleged looting of a fund intended to empower black farmers, as well as the effective 20-year sentence he faces.
Former Land Bank CEO Philemon Mohlahlane was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in the scam, which was alleged to have taken place between 2007 and 2008. The officials implicated in it were only arrested in 2011 and it took eight years for the case against them to be finalised.
Mohlaloga was fired by communications and digital technologies minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams in March 2019, a month after he was convicted and sentenced by the Pretoria Specialised Commercial Crime Court. He remains a free man pending the outcome of his appeal, which, a year and a half after he and his co-accused were convicted, has yet to be heard.
It was the state’s case that Mohlahlane conspired with Mohlaloga, who was, at the time, an ANC MP and chair of parliament’s portfolio committee on agriculture, and attorney Dinga Rammy Nkhwashu to unlawfully transfer R6m into the law firm’s trust account from the bank in 2008.
The Specialised Commercial Crime Court found that this money was transferred from AgriBEE, a broad-based BEE framework intended to support of black South Africans to actively participate fully in the agricultural sector, to Dingwako Farming Projects.
The court found that this was done without following due processes and Mohlahlane had instructed the fund manager at AgriBEE to authorise said payment without supporting documents.
The court also accepted the prosecution’s case that, contrary to what the application stated, the money was not used to benefit farm workers or upcoming farmers, but was spent on car payments and the purchase of two BMWs for Mohlaloga, among other things.
While the court accepted that the accused had bought a farm valued at R2.3m with part of the money in 2008, it also accepted the state’s argument that this was done to disguise the fraud that had actually been committed. The court found that Mohlaloga had only paid back some of the money he had received “when he realised he was in trouble”.
Mohlaloga fundamentally disputes this and is adamant that he and his co-accused were attempting to start a “farming project involving youth development” and submitted an application for grant funding to Land Bank, with Mohlahlane’s help, to that end. He claims the project unravelled because one of the state witnesses against him, senior manager in the office of the Limpopo premier Magwadi Goliath Tjia, had “regrettably” failed to implement it.
While admitting that he “received certain payments into his account”, Mohlaloga stressed that “the vast majority of this sum of money was paid back to the project”.
His lawyers insist that the state failed to produce evidence that even justified a response from him and contend that the case should have been thrown out without him even being required to testify. They further argue that the 20-year sentence Mohlaloga faces is ”disproportionate” to the crimes he has been convicted of.
The state will file its response to Mohlaloga’s appeal in the coming weeks.
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