The National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) Independent Directorate (ID) is caught yet again with its pants down in its case against prominent businessman Kishene Chetty and co-accused.
This was as the ID claimed it had a “new indictment” against Chetty and others which proved that State prosecutor, advocate Tilas Chabalala, did not do a “cut and paste” of previous charges.
Last week, the publication exposed how Chetty and his co-accused were charged with the same charges that were struck off the roll back in 2020.
In its response, ID spokesperson Henry Mamothame rubbished claims that there was a duplication of charges or that both Chabalala and Sunnel Bellochun have any personal vendetta against the businessman.
Mamothame insisted that the cases were of a serious nature, saying that the ID and its employees were not holding a vendetta against the accused.
He described Chetty’s assertion as fallacious to suggest that the charges in the Paroex case were a duplication of some of the charges in the Silverton CAS 335/05/2020.
Despite the ID’s rebuttal of the duplication, in the investigator’s sworn oath, Sunnel Bellochun admitted that he got some the information from the original docket 335/05/2020, which he got from a Colonel R Joubert.
“As part of our investigations information was requested from Colonel R Joubert (Joubert) on 2020-11-26 with regard to a company named Paroex Auto Tech and Mechanical Holdings with registration number 2016/504412/07 (Paroex).
“The information supplied by Joubert indicated that a number of contracts for goods and services were awarded to Paroex as contained in annexure marked SB1,” Bellochun disclosed in his statement.
When The Star asked for the “new indictment” from ID, it said that the document was a public document and that it was also served on the accused.
“The final indictment was filed at the Pretoria High Court and it is now a public document that can be accessed. Furthermore, the indictment was served to the accused in an open court,” Mamothame said.
Chetty did not deny ever receiving what he termed the “so-called new indictment” for Silverton Cas 335, saying that the charges from Silverton Cas 335 were struck off the roll with Chabalala, lead investigator and Bellochun opening new baby dockets by the “ID rogue unit”.
“These people are lying, I am glad that you have all the papers, and this alone exposes the rot in the NPA, and the abuse of power these people were subjecting us to.
“Chabalala, lead investigator and Bellochun are messing with our lives, they trump up charges against us, and they do that under the guise of doing their jobs,” the businessman added.
On the question of whether the State wasn’t prejudicing the accused, the ID spokesperson said the State did not as it followed the law when it compiled the case.
“The State has followed all due processes in dealing with this matter. Furthermore, the accused have legal representatives who can raise such concerns in a court of law should they believe their clients were subjected to any form of prejudice.”
Chetty said the ID’s actions were intended to harm all concerned and mislead their bosses. According to Chetty, he requested numerous sittings to explain such but the NDPP head and ID head refused, because of what he termed the “rogue unit” had “gate keepers” within.
The publication also found that Chabalala allegedly misled Judge Moosa during court proceedings when he asked if there were any other matters pending against Chetty and he said there were not, but he, however, charged Chetty with two more charges days later.
When the publication asked if what the State prosecutor did was not tantamount to perjury, Mamothame asked for evidence of what we asked him. When the publication provided him with the evidence of what transpired in the judge’s chambers, he failed to respond.
The Star can confirm from the papers it has at its disposal that Chetty and his co-accused were charged with corruption from the case that was thrown out of court in March 2022, despite the ID’s insistence that it has a “new indictment” which it is yet to produce.
From the documents the publication has seen, it clearly shows that all the charges were a copy and paste from the initial dropped charges.
For the past years, the NPA has been accused of abusing its prosecutorial powers in an attempt to prosecute and silence “suspects with chargers that were questionable”.
In 2016, then suspended KwaZulu-Natal Hawks commander Johan Booysen had launched a devastating legal attack on the fired national director of public prosecutions (NDPP), Shaun Abrahams, accusing him of what he termed “a clear abuse of prosecutorial power”.
In his papers lodged at the Pietermaritzburg High Court, Booysen alleged that Abrahams’s decisions to reauthorise racketeering charges against him and 17 other policemen “were part of a pattern of illegal activity by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) aimed at prosecuting them for crimes they have not committed, and with a clearly ulterior purpose”.
The Star