Werner Menges
15 April 2008
Windhoek — A Fraud case that has been pending against Ondangwa-based lawyer Arumugam Thambapilai since December 2005 was thrown out of court yesterday.
Thambapilai was arrested in December 2005 on a charge of fraud connected to a claim against the Motor Vehicle Accident Fund of Namibia (MVA Fund) that he had handled on behalf of a client. Thambapilai pleaded not guilty to the charge on October 19 2006, when he made his sixth court appearance in the matter, and his case was then postponed for the Prosecutor General to take a decision on the prosecution he was facing.
This proved to be the first of several such postponements over the year and almost six months that were to follow.
The most recent of these was in October last year, when Magistrate Suzette Walters granted the prosecution a final postponement for the Prosecutor General's decision. Yesterday Magistrate Elsie Schickerling refused to postpone the case once more for the same purpose, and instead ordered that the case be struck from the court roll. She ordered that Thambapilai's bail money be returned to him, and added that the prosecution may summon him to again appear in court if it is decided later to continue with the prosecution against him.
Public Prosecutor Carol-Ann Esterhuizen had asked Magistrate Schickerling to again postpone the case for the Prosecutor General's decision when Thambapilai made another appearance in the Windhoek Magistrate's Court yesterday.
Esterhuizen told the Magistrate that she had been informed that another 15 fraud cases are being investigated against Thambapilai. She said the Prosecutor General intended to consolidate all of these into one case, and asked the Magistrate for a further postponement to June 17 to give the Prosecutor General more time to take a decision on the matter.
Thambapilai's lawyer, Louis Botes, objected against a further postponement. He said the State had sufficient time to get its house in order, but it failed to do that, and has not placed any facts before the court to explain the failure to take a decision on the case. Magistrate Schickerling noted that the case dated from December 2005 and that it has been postponed three times already for the Prosecutor General's decision. Any further postponements for this reason would be an infringement on Thambapilai's right to a speedy trial, she commented.
Thambapilai is accused of having failed to inform the MVA Fund that a client who had lodged a claim against the fund had died before the claim, in an amount of $75 906, was paid out by the fund. It is alleged that Thambapilai still wrote a letter to the fund on the client's behalf in December 2002, while the client had died in February 2001 already. According to Thambapilai, though, he became aware of the client's death in September 2005 only, as he had been in contact with relatives of the client who were acting on her behalf while he was handling the MVA Fund claim.
In his plea, Thambapilai insisted that he had acted correctly at all times.
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