Dutch businessman accused of R6.8m swindle fails to have charges quashed

A Dutch businessman accused of swindling a bank of R6.8m has failed to convince the Cape Town high court to dismiss the charges against him.

Martin Korver, 55, faces charges ranging from theft to fraud and money laundering in the specialised commercial crime court in Bellville.

Korver allegedly duped Investec Bank Mauritius into giving him a loan using a four-star guest house in Somerset West as security.

He is also accused of instructing a law firm to register a mortgage bond over the guest house in “favour of Investec Bank Mauritius in order to secure the said loan”.

Korver, who lives in Plettenberg Bay, was a director of a company, Cobow, that owns Albourne Guest House.

He controlled the “financial and banking affairs” of the company before he resigned in 2016. That was after he opened a “call deposit account” on behalf of the company with Investec Bank in Mauritius and obtained a R6.8m loan.

His co-directors, Gustav Schaefer and Jan Eberhard Schliemann, said they were not aware of Korver’s intentions and the fact that the account was linked to his personal account.

Korver was arrested in 2018 on “two counts of fraud, alternatively, theft, totalling R6.8m,  five counts each of forgery, uttering and theft amounting to some R5.5m and one count of money laundering”.

He is out on bail and is yet to plead. He launched an application in the high court in Cape Town for a permanent stay of his prosecution in 2021. He also challenged the specialised commercial crime court magistrate’s order that he must hand over an audit report he had commissioned to the prosecution.

Judge Judith Cloete, with judge Lister Nuku concurring, reviewed and set aside the magistrate’s decision aside on Friday. But the court dismissed Korver’s application for a stay of prosecution.

“The investigation which I have conducted into the nature and degree of the irregularity complained of leads me to conclude that it did not result in irremediable prejudice to [Korver], whether by its very nature ... or its effect,” Cloete said in the judgment.

“There is nothing to prevent [Korver] from again approaching court at a later stage if he is able to demonstrate that any potential prejudice has become such a reality during the course of the trial that his constitutionally entrenched fair trial rights have been irreparably infringed.

"Accordingly, the case made out by [Korver] falls short of demonstrating the irremediable prejudice which he asserts, and the application for a permanent stay must fail.”

This was Korver’s second legal blow in three months. In December, Judge Ashley Binns-Ward dismissed his application for bail conditions to be relaxed so he could attend his daughter's birthday party in the Netherlands.

Korver told Binns-Ward he wanted to travel to his home country to “visit his elderly parents and one of his daughters who is currently living there”.

His bail conditions prevent him from travelling outside the Western Cape and Eastern Cape without notifying the investigating officer. He also had to surrender his travel documents.

Korver told the court he has lived in SA for 27 years and has been married to a South African since 2008.

“One of the primary motivations given in support of the application was the alleged desirability that [he] should be able to be with one of his daughters by a previous marriage when she celebrated her 21st birthday, which he regarded to represent her coming of age,” Binns-Ward said in his judgment.

“That milestone had already been passed however by the time the application was decided. The other was that he should be able to visit his elderly parents.”

Binns-Ward said, “the Covid-19 related travel restrictions summarily imposed and lifted by governments around the world during the ever-changing course of the pandemic show that if [Korver] leaves the country his ability to return on the date he is required for the purpose of court appearances could easily be compromised even if he wished to come back”.

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