Wiseman Khuzwayo
THE dissolution committee of the National Co-ordinating Committee for the Return of Exiles (NCCR) is pressing the attorney general to prosecute the eight people implicated in defrauding the organisation of possibly millions of rands.
This follows the disclosure in the WM&G last week of a report by a two-member commission of inquiry into the circumstances which led to the NCCR’s dire financial state and which discovered wholesale financial corruption.
On Wednesday attorney Jasmina Sooka, who assisted the commission, said only two NCCR staff members had been prosecuted and convicted of stealing R300 000. They were sentenced to do community service.
Sooka said that since the submission of the report, eight names had been sent to the attorney general by the dissolution committee on the basis that they were conclusively implicated in fraudulent activities in the commission’s report. Sooka also disclosed the committee was considering taking legal action against the NCCR bankers, Standard Bank, for negligence.
The report singled out four prominent NCCR executive members as bearing responsibility for the fiasco, if largely by ommission: chairman Frank Chikane, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches; Brother Jude Pieterse, of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference; vice-chairman Mohammed Dangor, now an ANC member of the PWV legislature; and finance committee chairman Victor Gillings, of the World Conference on Religion and Peace.
Auditors said the books were “unauditable, and “serious structural problems in the NCCR” meant trying to maintain order “was like chasing an avalanche”.