Former Western Cape premier Peter Marais intervened directly to ensure provincial environment officials made a decision on the Roodefontein golf estate development, the regional court in George heard on Tuesday.
Marais and then-environment and development provincial minister David Malatsi are accused of taking a R400 000 bribe from Roodefontein developer Count Riccardo Agusta to smooth the way for approval of the project.
Independent environment consultant Cathy Avierinos, whose HilLand Associates was hired to work on the project, told the court that in April 2002 she was told to attend an on-site meeting at which Agusta, Marais and Malatsi and their entourage of bodyguards were present.
The politicians were given a brief presentation on the planned R500-million development, sited in the Piesang Valley at Plettenberg Bay, and went on a helicopter flip over the area before going to lunch at a local hotel.
Some weeks later the project manager, Robert Browning, called her to a meeting at Marais’s office in Cape Town. Also there on the day were Malatsi; the head of his department, Theo Tolmay; and the department’s director for environmental management, Ingrid Coetzee, who had Malatsi’s delegated authority to issue the department’s formal record of decision — approval or rejection — on the application for the development.
Browning addressed the meeting on the problems the developers were facing, and said Agusta was getting frustrated at the delays in getting a decision from province.
”It was quite an emotional plea if you could call it that,” she said.
Coetzee told the meeting that some aspects of the plan were still outstanding, but did not mention, said Avierinos, that the department’s George office had mislaid the developers’ original application.
After this general discussion Marais asked Malatsi to be ”accountable” for his department, and the provincial minister undertook to have a decision by the department within days, she said.
At one stage Marais said he had been expecting to hear ”big issues about fynbos and butterflies”, and he was not hearing that, so the department should make a decision.
”It was almost like a mini-trial, except the premier was sitting in that position,” said Avierinos, indicating magistrate Andre le Grange. ”I didn’t get the impression anyone was particularly happy to be there.”
Marais’s attitude had been ”almost reprimanding”, she said. ”The atmosphere was pretty tense.”
She said that after that meeting, Coetzee’s delegated powers were removed, and the development was approved by a different official, with conditions, some of which the developers felt were too onerous or should not have had time frames attached to them.
The developers appealed, the conditions were removed, and construction of the golf driving range on the estate began.
Earlier, Avierinos’s husband, Gavin Hellstrom, a partner in HilLand, told the court he was asked in 1998 to do a scoping report on a proposed retirement village at Roodefontein.
At that time alleged Mafia kingpin Vito Palazzolo was ”giving the instructions”, he said.
He never got paid for that work, and had no idea what happened to the project.
”It just fell flat; it just fizzled out,” he said.
Two years later HilLand was asked to be part of a professional team to develop the golf estate on Roodefontein, and he attended an on-site meeting with a group that included Palazzolo’s eldest son, Christian von Palace Kolbatshenko.
Kolbatshenko was a director of Centaur Studs, a company that later changed its name to Count Agusta Golf and Equestrian Estates.
Hellstrom said he had sought to follow international best practice by taking a ”bottom-up” approach, beginning with an assessment of the natural environment and only then considering what development would be appropriate.
This was the first time he had been given a ”clean slate”, and the power to determine where, how and when the development should take place.
He said his job as an independent consultant was not to convince anyone that the development was good or bad.
”It’s to put the environmental facts on the table, obtain public participation, raise key issues around a particular project,” he said. ”Theoretically, our client is the environment.”
Hellstrom said he became frustrated at repeated requests from environment department officials in George for more information on the development, which he believed would be more environmentally friendly than ”the normal development”.
HilLand has supplied the office with all the studies and specialist studies it asked for, bar one statistical comparison, which a University of Cape Town academic advised him would be scientifically incorrect.
The case officer in the department, Dr Steve du Toit, had not been personally obstructive, but perhaps did not have a full understanding of the process, and was raising issues that were inappropriate.
This was not done with malice, Hellstrom said.
At the start of Tuesday’s hearing, prosecutor Bruce Morrison told the court that the state did not intend calling Agusta as a witness.
Agusta last month paid a R1-million fine after conceding in a plea bargain agreement with the Scorpions that he ”unlawfully and corruptly” gave a R400 000 donation through the two men to the New National Party.
The money, he said, was meant to remove obstacles to provincial approval of Roodefontein. Morrison told the court he intended leading evidence from two ”camps”, the Roodefontein developers backed by the Plettenberg Bay municipality, and environmentalists, to indicate the state of affairs when the money was handed over in April 2002.
He said the state would show that the province’s issuing of a positive record of decision — in other words, approval of the project — was not ”apt” at the time payments were made. — Sapa