Judgement is to be delivered on Monday in the protracted bail application launched in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court by J Arthur Brown, former executive chairperson of the Fidentia Group.
The hearing before Magistrate Justhree Steyn was postponed on Friday.
After prosecutors Bruce Morrison SC and Thersia du Toit and the defence team, Rashad and Rushdie Khan, had completed their closing arguments, Morrison said the different cases against Brown were ”particularly serious”.
Brown had been out on bail in two other cases — the first involving Fidentia and the Transport, Education and Training Authority (Teta), and the second involving Fidentia and the two investment concerns, Fundi and Infinity — when he was rearrested in the Antheru Trust case.
The Antheru Trust case had also implicated Brown’s wife, Susan, who had secretly fled the country for Australia, knowing that a warrant for her arrest was to be executed but was being held in abeyance for a while.
Morrison said her surreptitious departure had been the catalyst that set in motion steps for her husband’s immediate arrest.
Morrison described the wife’s disappearance as an ”act of extreme bad faith”, and had turned Brown into a flight risk.
There was very little to stop Brown from absconding if released on bail, because his business was now ruined.
He said the wife’s departure, on a cancelled passport that had been reported to home affairs as missing or lost, had caused a complete breakdown in the defence team’s negotiations with the Scorpions.
He said the law stipulated that a court ”shall” order an accused person’s incarceration until he or she had been dealt with in accordance with the law, unless the accused was able to persuade the court that his release on bail was in the interests of justice.
Morrison said an arrested person did not have an absolute constitutional right to be set free, and the state contended that Brown’s release on bail was against the interests of justice.
He said a bail court was not concerned with the guilt or innocence of the accused, and the interests of justice demanded that an accused remain in custody if there was any likelihood of him evading his trial if released on bail. — Sapa