Battle for justice

A Polokwane family is down and out amid the reported sequestration of their affluent father’s estate, the liquidation of companies and attachment of properties that serve as landmarks in a greater battle for justice after his suicide in February 2013. The four children of the late owner of a small business empire are pursuing righteousness after an initial suicide note reportedly directed them towards the patriarch’s insistence to apparently have a prominent Limpopo figure arrested and prosecuted.
One of the four children of the late businessman, who died at his house in Polokwane on 4 February 2013, stressed that they were inflexible in seeing justice done. It was the content of their father’s suicide note that led them to open a criminal case in May 2013. However, in a copy of a letter from the Director of Public Prosecutions in Limpopo, dated 19 February this year, his sibling was informed that the information available in the docket did not constitute an offence of fraud or theft as suspected and that it has been decided not to prosecute. He was of the opinion that they were not convinced that enough had been done to ascertain grounds for prosecution. The major contention was that the suicide note had not been verified to positively identify the handwriting as that of their father as prerequisite to open the criminal case in the absence of their late father, he pointed out.
He said they were now intending to take up the matter with the prosecuting authority after the representative of a family trust entering into the sale of a Phalaborwa business with their father and his then business partner would have registered a criminal matter in that town. They expected the process to kick in on Monday.
Other than that they also contemplated a court interdict against perceived illegal activity by the concerns of their father’s former business partner and any further actions against their father’s estate, he said. He explained that the estate had thus far been sequestrated, that his father’s three companies – an engineering business and a laboratory in the city as well as a testing station with six branches across the province – had been liquidated and that the attachment of his properties was in the process of being finalised.
He pointed at the death note his father reportedly left that cast aspersions on the alleged business-related actions of the lawyer with whom he had entered into a Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) buy-out of a reported R45 million funded through a loan agreement. A R3 million deposit by the late businessman towards the transaction is alluded to in documentation provided by a source who summarised alleged questionable actions in a date line of events going back to 4 April 2011, when the sale of business agreement had reportedly been signed.
In the time line there is reference to the late businessman drafting a letter and emails to a Minister Chivane, upon investigation identified as late Minister Collins Chabane, requesting a meeting to discuss the business partner’s alleged fronting and for government assistance to keep the company’s doors open and the 280 staff members in employment four days prior to his death. Chabane died in a horror crash along the N1 highway between Polokwane and Mokopane on 15 March 2015.
The source said the relevant parties were expected to be served court papers by the end of this week challenging the actual transaction and that the criminal matter was being taken further.
NPA response is awaited.

Story: YOLANDE NEL
>>observer.yolande@gmail.com