Court officials nabbed for alleged R1.4-million theft

For two years, they allegedly siphoned R1.4-million from a Johannesburg court, but now two court officials are facing 265 fraud charges after being nabbed on Friday.

On Monday Jacob Mateke and Thabisile Mabaso, both cash hall supervisors at the Alexandra Magistrate’s Court, found themselves on the other side of the law when they appeared in the dock at the Alexandra Regional Court.

The duo was arrested on Friday at the court, where they were tasked with capturing third party funds, including maintenance and bail payments to the court. They both started working at the court in 2004.

The money they allegedly stole did not belong to the court, but to maintenance beneficiaries, those due to be reimbursed bail and other third parties.

According to the charge sheet, Mateke, 47, and Mabaso, 42, acting with a common purpose, conned the court out of R1 442 740 between 2010 and 2012. Their modus operandi, according to the state, is that when members of the public paid money to the court, the two captured a lesser amount on the Justice Deposit Account System or, in some cases, they did not capture the transaction at all.

The two were suspended a month ago and their arrest, after handing themselves over by agreement, follows a five-month long investigation by a task team set up by the Justice Department. The task team was established to probe a spate of thefts at the courts after the department learnt that Gauteng courts alone lose over R30-million a year in third-party money.

Last month the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court found two Justice Department officials guilty of multiple counts of fraud, money laundering and racketeering after conning the department out of R3.2-million, which they splurged on gambling, alcohol and drugs.

In September, the Alexandra Regional Court found Phathutshedzo Tshivhangani, a former senior administration officer at Soweto’s Protea Magistrate’s Court, guilty of stealing over R60 000 from the court’s cash hall.

Tshivhangani, 32, was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud. She also received additional sentences of five years’ imprisonment each for two further counts, one of fraud and one of theft, to run concurrently. These two sentences were suspended for five years provided she is not found guilty of a similar offence in that period.

Mateke and Mabaso were each granted R5 000 bail during their brief court appearance on Monday. They are set to return to court next month, where the matter is expected to be transferred to another court.