Justice minister Thembi Simelane has a duty to fully divulge the details of her dealings with VBS Mutual Bank.
She has acknowledged in newspaper reports that she took a R575,600 loan from the liquidated bank in 2016 to buy a coffee shop and says that she paid back the legitimate “commercial loan” in full. But she has failed to provide either proof of the repayment or the terms of the loan. Was the loan interest-free or granted at a concessional rate to lure Simelane, who was then mayor of Polokwane, into the VBS net?
A key modus operandi of the bank was to get municipalities to invest their funds in the bank, an illegal practice in terms of the Municipal Finance Management Act, as municipalities are not allowed to deposit funds in a mutual bank. The owners of VBS were accused of bribing municipal officials to divert funds to the bank. Of the 15 implicated municipalities across the country, most were in Limpopo, with the Polokwane municipality depositing R349m into VBS.
It is alleged that top executives of the bank misappropriated nearly R2bn.
Simelane is not the only one embroiled in the VBS saga. It is alleged that EFF leader Julius Malema and the party’s former deputy president, Floyd Shivambu, received funds from the bank.
In the interests of transparency and accountability, nothing less than full disclosure will be sufficient from Simelane, who as minister of justice is custodian of the rule of law and is the minister responsible for the National Prosecuting Authority, which is prosecuting VBS cases.
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