The fight over deceased businessman and tender tycoon Wandile Bozwana’s R300 million estate between his family and widow Tsholofelo is still raging on, and the battlefield has now moved to law enforcement agencies.
Sunday World can reveal that Bozwana’s family, led by brother Benedict with a private forensic and investigation company, has opened a case of fraud against Tsholofelo, alleging that she forged her husband’s will.
In the contested will, Tsholofelo and her sister, Harriet Masondo are appointed executors and legal guardians of Bozwana’s children outside wedlock.
The Bozwana family believes this is impossible, indicating that the businessman was very fond of his mother and he would not have excluded her from his estate.
In a police statement seen by Sunday World, both Benedict and Independent Crime Investigating Services (ICIS) said they managed to trace a man who signed as a witness on Bozwana’s will, and he told them that the will was forged.
Benedict said he discovered this information in 2016 during his conversation with Tshepo Mpete after he found that Mpete had signed his brother’s will as a witness.
Benedict said Mpete originally told him that he was not aware of the will and said people would go to jail if he talked about Bozwana’s will and answered his questions.
“He said his life could also be in danger,” reads the statement. The contentious will was submitted to Momentum (the executors of the estate) for processing, and is currently the only document the company is working on to help distribute the millions left behind by the North West tycoon.
According to ICIS’s statement, deposed in support of the charges against Tsholofelo, its investigation found that the will submitted to Momentum was fraudulent, indicating that the Wandile Bozwana signatures and the writing styles on the will did not match those of Bozwana.
The private company’s head of investigations, Thabang Kotsedi, said in the statement that forensic examiners found that the letters A in the will did not match those of Bozwana after they checked it against tender documents that were signed by the deceased businessman.
He said the letters and signature on the will appeared to match those of Tsholofelo.
The statement further indicates that the company, while investigating the matter, discovered through several court officials at the master of the high court that the original will had disappeared and had not been seen since it was collected by three court officials from the head office.
Kotsedi said he inquired with officials who were listed as the last people to access the file, and they too were not cooperating with their investigation.
He said that court officials had checked the safe where the will was meant to have been stored for safe keeping after it was checked, but said that it had vanished.
Sunday World has listened to audio recordings of the meetings between the investigation company and court officials, and in these recordings the court officials concede that the original will was stolen, and that it had been irregularly accessed by court officials.
Provincial police spokesman Mavela Masondo confirmed that a case was opened and was being investigated by the commercial crime unit of the police.
Bozwana was killed in a hail of bullets on the N1 Garsfontein offramp in Pretoria in October 2015.
Tsholofelo did not respond to questions sent to her.
