Fred Kockott
23 November 2008
South Africa's largest private healthcare group Netcare, was paid significant sums by international organ broker Ilan Perry to harvest kidneys from live "donors", many allegedly from Brazil, for transplanting into Israeli patients at Durban's St Augustine's hospital.
This arrangement, say both parties in court papers in the Johannesburg High Court, arose from an "oral agreement" that resulted in Netcare receiving from Perry a total of R19,4-million for 89 such operations at Durban's St Augustine's hospital between June 2001 and October 2003.
But Perry alleges that his company, UDG Medical Services, overpaid Netcare, and has attempted to sue St Augustine's for a refund of R5,3m. Netcare in turn states that total costs of harvesting and transplanting the 89 kidneys amounted to R21,1m and has submitted a counter claim, demanding further payment of R1,6m from the Israeli organ broker.
At the time of bringing this civil case in May 2004, the SAPS commercial crimes unit was already investigating Perry's alleged involvement in more than 300 illegal kidney transplants at Netcare clinics in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, and had issued a warrant for his arrest.
This meant if Perry had arrived in South Africa to pursue his civil claim, he could have been arrested and charged, and the civil case has yet to progress beyond the filing of affidavits.
But criminal investigations have not fallen off the agenda and prosecuting authorities remain convinced these operations were part of a vast international transplanting racket involving the sale of kidneys.
Weekend Argus has also established that the National Prosecuting Authority's investigations, dating back five years, are now nearing conclusion with various criminal charges in the process of being drafted.
Possible charges include racketeering, fraud, culpable homicide, grievous bodily assault and various contraventions of the Human Tissue Act, which prohibits the sale of organs.
But the NPA has remained tight-lipped about suspects.
While Netcare states that all the "donors" and recipients in its "Israeli transplant programme" were related, Johan Wessels, a forensic consultant appointed by the health department to focus on contraventions of the Human Tissue Act, reckons that records even in the civil case, including a list of the 89 "donors" and recipients indicate otherwise.
"The recipients were rich Israelis and the 'donors' mostly desperately poor, unsophisticated and sometimes illiterate people, who were paid to part with their kidneys," said Wessels.
He said it would now be "patently ridiculous for Netcare executives and senior management to publicly deny knowledge of the racket and all these illegal kidney transplants".
"These records show that parties were in business together, knowingly engaged in something illegal (which Netcare strenuously denies). It's certainly bizarre that this dispute over proceeds of crime was taken to the High Court," said Wessels.
He said the scheme had started with "vendors" being paid up to $20 000 for a kidney. "Then middlemen started driving the price of kidneys down to about $2 500. It was a hugely lucrative racket. There was massive exploitation, but nobody bothered about it. They were all making too much money."
Wessels said the subsequent legal squabble over proceeds reminded him how police had originally stumbled upon evidence of kidney "donors" being trafficked into South Africa.
That was in December 2003 when a Durban "middleman", Sushahn Meier, who co-ordinated accommodation arrangements and facilitated payments to kidney "donors", laid a theft complaint against a man who received cash in dollars for a kidney, but then fled from the operating theatre at St Augustine's before it could be cut out.
Subsequent confessions led to the convictions of Meier, another Durban facilitator, Roderick Kimberley, and an Israeli kidney recipient, Agani Robel, 41.
This evidence also assisted in prosecutions in Brazil of a retired military captain, Ivan Bonifacio da Silva, his Israeli partner Gedalya Tauber, and nine others.
Although Perry was arrested in Germany in 2006 at the request of SA authorities, the extradition process was bungled and he walked free.
The case against eight KwaZulu-Natal doctors and Netcare's regional transplant co-ordinator Lindy Dickson, arising from more than 100 allegedly illegal transplants at St Augustine's, was also withdrawn in 2006 after the NPA declared that it was not ready to proceed.
This original charge sheet had cited Netcare as a complainant in the case against the doctors and Netcare staff involved in the "Israeli transplant programme". The NPA has since appointed a special prosecutor, advocate Robin Palmer of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, to help finalise investigations and decide whether there would be any prosecutions and on what charges.
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