The state has given details of how a former MTN junior accountant who had been earning R22,000 a month allegedly stole an average of R7.6m a year from the company for seven years without being detected.
On Wednesday, Ruth Moshabane pleaded not guilty to all the charges; she had made her first appearance five years ago after Standard Bank contacted MTN after noticing 90 huge transactions from the company’s bank accounts into hers.
According to the indictment submitted in court at the specialised criminal court in Palm Ridge, Ekurhuleni, on Wednesday, Moshabane stole R53.7m through 90 transactions made between December 2010 and April 2017, the year she was finally arrested.
She allegedly moved cash from the company’s bank accounts to her two personal accounts from FNB under the false pretence that she was paying Mutual & Federal and Guardrisk Insurance for services that the companies were to render.
Moshabane had access to 76 MTN bank accounts that were used to pay vendors.
The document alleges that Moshabane moved the first R60,000 on December 13 2010 and two days later, she paid herself another R42,500 – earning herself R96,000 for that month.
The following month she made two transactions totalling R117,000. But in February 2011, her transactions jumped to more than R577,000.
In August of the same year she made three transactions that were close to R600,000.
However, the month of May seemed to be her big bonanza as she transferred R869,000 to herself in that month in 2012 and another R1,6m in two tranches in May of 2013.
November of 2013 was also her bravest month as she transferred more than R2m in three tranches into her account within a 16-day period undetected.
Her greed took hold of her in July 2015 when her transactions became fewer but bigger. She transferred a one-off R1.6m followed by another single payment of R1.6m in September 2015.
After this she continued to steal an average of R1.5m a month for at least the next 14 months until she was caught out in April 2017 when Standard Bank picked up the unusual transactions and informed her employer.
During her 2017 bail hearing, the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU) attached her five houses, seven vehicles and investments and froze her bank accounts. At the time, the state said Moshabane was transferring some of the houses to relatives in a bid to conceal them.
It is alleged that Moshabane had changed lawyers about eight times, which delayed the beginning of the trial.
Her lawyer, Carel van Heerden, told the court that her client would make admissions in terms of Section 220 of the Criminal Procedure Act.
In the admission submitted to court, Moshabane confirmed that the two FNB bank accounts that received payments from MTN belonged to her and not the service providers as she had claimed.
“The accounts mentioned above do not belong to any of the companies or service providers mentioned in the preamble of the charge sheet but to me. I admit that the account numbers mentioned above were not loaded in vendor account on the MTN SA master vendor database,” she said in the document read in court.
Moshabane further admitted that the money she allegedly transferred into her Absa and Standard Bank accounts belonged to MTN SA.
She also admitted that the bank statements printed from these bank accounts are “true, genuine and correct”.
She is yet to explain in court how the money got into her personal bank accounts.
State prosecutor Bongani Chauke told the court: “The accused gave out and pretended that the said payments or transfers of money from MTN SA bank accounts was with the company’s approval. She pretended that Mutual & Federal and Guardrisk Insurance were service providers of the company that were going to render future services.”
Chauke added that Mutual & Federal and Guardrisk Insurance were not entitled to any payment but were used by Moshabane to disguise the fraud and theft.
Moshabane is out on R200,000 bail.
The case was postponed to later in September for trial.
Sowetan
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