Wyndham Hartley, Parliamentary Editor
11 June 2003
Cape Town — National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka wants asset forfeiture laws to be strengthened following the high court ruling that allowed controversial businessman Billy Rautenbach to move assets out of the country.
Rautenbach, the former head of Hyundai SA, who was facing charges of fraud, money laundering and theft, won a court order last year forcing the release of more than R40m of his assets that were being held by the Asset Forfeiture Unit. The assets facing forfeiture included a luxury home in Johannesburg, a farm in Paarl, aircraft, a yacht, as well as various bank accounts.
Certain of them have allegedly been moved to Zimbabwe.
Ngcuka, briefing Parliament's justice committee on the work of the p rosecuting authority, said that the Rautenbach case raised a number of issues for law enforcement which might require legislative amendments.
The Pretoria High Court had ordered that Rautenbach's notice of appeal did not mean that the restraint order was reinstated and the assets had to be returned. Ngcuka said that this allowed fugitives from justice to contest forfeiture proceedings without subjecting themselves to the jurisdiction of the courts.
African National Congress committee chairman Johnny de Lange said the situation could not be allowed to happen again .
Ngcuka said that taking the profit out of crime remained one of the key objectives of the prosecuting authority.
The number of seizures, made by the unit in terms of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act, had increased from 25 in 19992000 to 147 in 2002-03.
In those four years the assets frozen amounted to R500m, and 129 forfeiture orders involving R76m had been granted.
He pointed out that the Constitutional Court, in making a ruling on a forfeiture, had said "it is widely accepted in the international community that criminals should be stripped of the proceeds of their crimes, the purpose being to remove the incentive for crime, not to punish them".
He also told the committee that members of the prosecuting authority were now going to police stations on Sundays to review police dockets. This was an attempt to deal with the high number of withdrawals of cases from court rolls.
Acknowledging that the high number of withdrawals compared with finalised cases was a cause for concern, Ngcuka said that this could refer to poor quality investigations by police or bad decisions from prosecutors.
Ngcuka said that there were ongoing consultations to ensure that no arrests took place without the decision of a prosecutor. Prescreening by prosecutors would help to keep cases without a chance of success from getting onto court rolls in the first place.
Earlier this week Chief Justice Arthur Chaskelson said that he could not stress enough the harm done if a single link in the criminal justice chain failed. In some cases this was because pretrial preparation was not done properly. He said that it was intolerable that awaiting-trial prisoners remained in prison for so long and warned that the courts were going to start dismissing cases that were not presented speedily .
He said that delays of three to four years in bringing cases to court were intolerable, and this was leading to gross overcrowding in the awaiting-trial sections of the country's prisons.
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