JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Thursday
FORMER special government advisor Pieter Rootman lodged 25 complaints against the elite Scorpions investigation unit for alleged gross human rights violations after being arrested on R1m fraud charges last week.
Rootman said Scorpions investigators were guilty of “unconstitutional conduct” when they raided his Pretoria home and arrested him. The investigators removed a personal computer and other evidence from his home.
Scorpions spokesman, Sipho Ngwema, was not immediately available for comment.
Rootman is accused of abusing donor funds while serving as special advisor to former Mpumalanga Premier Mathews Phosa until mid-1999. Court documents allege that Rootman duped Ingwe Coal into giving him R1m by pretending the money would be handed over the government for capacity building.
The money, in two cheques of R500_000 each, was allegedly instead deposited into a secret trust account managed by Deloitte & Touch in the name of the Mpumalanga provincial government.
Rootman is accused of using R264_000 of the funds to settle his personal home bond, plus R70 000 to buy shares through a brokerage and an additional R200_000 to buy a second house from Aida Property.
Rootman is also accused of fraudulently soliciting an additional R90 000 donation from Billiton Trust for capacity building in Premier Phosa’s department but allegedly kept the donation secret and instead used the money for personal expenses.
The charge sheet stresses that all donations to government should be channelled through the Treasury, and maintains that Rootman knew this and deliberately circumvented the system.
Rootman appeared briefly in the Nelspruit Regional Court last week, where he was released on R5_000 bail when the case was postponed to April 10.
Phosa and Rootman have since claimed that senior African National Congress (ANC) politicians and government officials had conspired to implicate them in apparent irregularities in an attempt to silence them.
The plot, they claimed, included “manufactured” fraud charges that led to Rootman’s arrest, and false evidence against Phosa at the ANC’s internal Maphisa Commission into political infighting within Mpumalanga in 1999.
Phosa and Rootman insisted at the weekend that the findings were based on false evidence by witnesses who were either paid or pressurised to lie.
Phosa has warned he would release “explosive” evidence implicating scores of other party officials in bribery, blackmail, distortion and the obstruction of justice. – African Eye News Service
ZA*NOW:
Admit you lied, Phosa tells ANC March 7, 2001