No-nonsense former justice minister Thembi Simelane had rejected a request by National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) head Shamila Batohi to renew Adv Paul Pretorius’ R4 500 per hour contract, days before President Cy-ril Ramaphosa removed her from the powerful position.
Pretorius had a six-months contract working as a consultatn for the Independent Directorate (ID), the investigative wing of the NPA.
Simelane has been at loggerheads with Batohi for some time over the renewal of the contracts of some of the prosecuting authority’s top management and
access to the explosive files from the Zondo commission into state capture.
Another burning issue between Simelane and Batohi was the fact that the NPA had kept Adv Anton du Plessis, who is a deputy director of public prosecutions, after he failed his security clearance due to his dual citizenship.
NPA spokesperson Adv Mthunzi Mhaga referred all questions about this issue to his ID counterpart, Henry Mathomane. But Mathomane also refused to answer five direct questions we sent to him about the matter.
“We have taken note but will not engage with these issues in the media. We have important work to do.”
Sunday World understands one of the reasons Simelane declined to renew Pretorius’ contract was the fact that there was a conflict of interest in his employment. Pretorius was the evidence leader for the Zondo Commission and is now set to prosecute the same cases.
The EFF condemned Pretorius’s appointment by the NPA as well as that of Adv Matthew Chaskalson, who was also evidence leader at the Zondo commission.
The red berets said their appointments “can only be characterised as gross collusion, opportunism and undermining of the wheels of natural justice”.
“The appointments of these two individuals under a cloud of secrecy, wherein there is also a refusal to disclose their remuneration for their consulting services, would be amusing if it did not undermine the integrity and legitimacy of the NPA.
“In a quest to rescue her dwindling repu-tation and salvage a sense of achievement in a term defined by failure, Batohi has abandoned sense and lost an apprecia-tion of the law as a neutral instrument to administer justice,” the EFF said in a press statement.
Three independent sources told Sunday World this week that Pretorius’s contract ended on November 30, and Simelane refused to renew it “for obvious reasons”.
The sources also confirmed that Pretorius was earning R4 500 per hour.
“For six months, Advocate Pretorius, with all the evidence he gathered at the Zondo commission, failed to take a single person to court while he has been earning a fat salary. It was for obvious reasons that Pretorius’s contract wasn’t renewed.
“What is so special that he is doing that other NPA and ID advocates, who earn a normal salary, can’t do – fokol, just milking it?” our second mole asked.
Our third source claims that after Batohi wrote to Simelane requesting that she must renew Pretorius’s contract, all hell broke loose when the former justice minister refused. “She received questions from some media outlets questioning her about her lifestyle. It was a clear
message to her: ‘re new the contract, or we are taking you to the cleaners.’
“Remember that Simelane received the first set of questions about her loan with Gundo Wealth Solutions just hours after she was asked to hand over the Zondo files to the NPA without following pro-per procedures, and she refused.”
Simelane admitted to Ramaphosa that she took a R575 600 loan with Gundo Wealth Solutions, a company that facilitated investments for the Polokwane local municipality in the now-defunct VBS Mutual Bank in 2016, while she was mayor of the city.
Since the story about her loan broke, she has been asked to resign due to a conflict of interest, which she has denied.
Sunday World understands Simelane was surprised on Monday when she received a call informing her that Ramaphosa was considering removing her from justice to be the human settlement minister. Ramaphosa swapped Simelane with Mmamoloko Kubayi in a low-key cabinet reshuffle on Tuesday. Kubayi is now the justice minister.
One of our moles says that if Simelane was as corrupt as it has been reported, Ramaphosa would have fired her from his cabinet. “The fact that the president retained her in another cabinet position shows he has confidence in her and that the case against her was a witchhunt by those who saw her as a stumbling block in their quest to capture the justice system.
“The president was put under pressure to fire her but he decided to redeploy, which didn’t go down well with her detractors,” the source said.
