Africa-Press – South-Africa. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA)’s Investigating Directorate (ID) has said it would appeal the R24.9-million Nulane Investments fraud and money laundering judgment.
On Thursday, the ID’s head, advocate Andrea Johnson, said while the judgment was a setback, they remained focused and committed to ensuring justice prevailed for state capture and other serious corruption within its mandate.
She added that those most responsible were held to account and deprived of their ill-gotten gains.
“This is a fight for the future of our country, which we will not give up on, but it won’t be a quick or easy win,” Johnson said.
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Last month, the first state capture case brought to trial saw the Free State High Court granting Section 174 discharges to all but one of the accused in the Nulane case.
The final accused, former Free State agriculture department official Limakatso Moorosi, closed her case and was then acquitted.
Acting Judge Nompumelelo Gusha ruled the State had failed to produce enough evidence to show the Gupta family and their associates were implicated in the laundering of R24.9 million of the proceeds of the alleged Nulane scam.
News24 reported Gusha said the State’s own financial experts had sounded the “death knell” for its case when they admitted they had made mistakes in their assessment of the Gupta network’s finances and conceded there was nothing untoward about its money transfers.
Gusha also slammed the police’s failed attempts to properly secure documents relevant to the Nulane trial as a “comedy of errors” and lambasted the State for “the lackadaisical manner in which this case was investigated and approached”.
The State argued the Free State Department of Agriculture paid R24.9 million to Nulane, a company owned and controlled by former Transnet board member Iqbal Sharma, for a fraudulent feasibility study of the Free State’s flagship Mohoma Mobung project – the genesis of the alleged Vrede dairy project scam – between 2011 and 2012.
However, Nulane had no employees on its books and subcontracted Deloitte to produce the report.
Deloitte was paid R1.5 million for the work.
Nulane is alleged to have subsequently changed the findings of the Deloitte-authored study to identify Paras – an Indian dairy farm allegedly linked to the Guptas – as the most suitable implementing partner for setting up a milk processing plant in Vrede, Free State.
The alleged Vrede dairy project scam, which would see millions of rand intended for poor black dairy farmers allegedly being diverted to the Guptas and their associates, was then born.
ID spokesperson Sindisiwe Seboka said the NPA remained “deeply” concerned with the decision by a court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) not to extradite Rajesh and Atul Gupta.
“With regard to the UAE court’s decision to deny extradition of the Gupta brothers, the NPA remains deeply concerned, in light of the fact that it worked through SA’s central authority and did everything in line with the UAE treaty requirements.
“It also complied with all other requests of the UAE authorities,” Seboka added.
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