Cape Town - The law is abut to get tough on white collar crimes.
Intelligence experts have said the focus has been shifted to professionals who have managed to evade the law because of a lack of regulation.
This week, the South African Revenue Services (Sars) said they noted an increase in refund claims being submitted for VAT & PAYE to non-payment of taxes and Customs offences.
They have revealed that their Criminal Investigations Unit is currently investigating close to 800 cases, and have delivered 173 dockets to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) last year, and have over 400 cases are on trial.
This is just the tip of the ice-berg in white-collar crime’s dirty and colluding agenda lid being lifted.
This week, the NPA confirmed that Jeanette van Zyl appeared in the Wellington Magistrate’s Court on charges of fraud amounting to R11.2 million.
The State alleges Van Zyl pretended that she was depositing the money into the bank accounts of creditors while she was depositing it into her own bank accounts.
Another case completed at the Bellville Commercial Crimes Court this month is where the former Chief Financial Officer of one of the biggest jewellery wholesalers and distributors of gold and diamond jewellery to independent retailers and national chain stores was sentenced to effectively nine-years imprisonment.
Shaun Norman Currin, the former CEO of Oro Africa, was convicted on 32 counts of fraud, a count of theft and a count of money laundering.
He was sentenced to a total of 49 years imprisonment, but the court ordered some sentences to run concurrently, resulting in an effective nine-year direct imprisonment.
The NPA said as a result of the accused’s unauthorised and fraudulent transactions depicted, the complainant (company) suffered an actual loss of R 7.855m.
The Bellville Regional Court also fined tax practitioner and owner of Superior Accounting Services, Moegamat Shafiek Kha, R1 million, which he must pay to Sars on or before June 1 and was handed down a five-year suspended sentence. He was further sentenced to two years of correctional supervision.
Khan’s sentence follows his conviction on five counts of fraud committed over five years. The 53-year-old defrauded Sars by under-declaring to the tune of R3,14 million, which led to the underpayment of R1,16 million to the revenue service for the tax years of 2004 to 2008.
The Sars media office said examples were even happening at hospitals across the country, amounting to millions.
“In this regard, Sars has witnessed a rise in all categories of tax crimes, from false refund claims for VAT & PAYE to non-payment of taxes and Customs offences. Sars employs a number of tools to address non-compliance, such as penalties (of up to 200% of the tax owed) and civil actions. However, offences of a serious nature merit a custodial sentence.
Eldred De Klerk, director of the African Centre for Security and Intelligence Praxis, said the reason why these types of criminals managed to evade the law was a lack of regulation and inspection, often leavening the door open for two worlds to collide and conspire.
“We have always maintained that so-called corruption cannot survive unless there is collusion and complicity from professionals, but it's in the individual capacity or the institutional complicity in maintaining set corruption. They have always focused on the public sector because that is the public purse, and we use public coffers and public money.
“What we forget, though, is that the so-called private sector and the white-collar criminals are also working with public money, whether it's money we have seen in the bigger cases that are notorious where pension funds have been pillaged, and people have benefited from that, and we have had a number of convictions there.
“Now that we are heeding the call and focusing to deal with white-collar crime, we now see how pervasive it is, and we see the extent to which so-called professionals who were thought were above reproach and in fact, are professionals and have been allowed.
“The big thing is that they have been allowed to regulate themselves, including the banking sector.
“This self-regulation has not been proven to be working. I would think we should be keeping the focus where it matters on both so-called white-collar criminals and contact crime and looking at issues of complicity, corruption and collusion in the public sphere.
“What made it so that these so -called professionals are above being corrupted.
“We have always thought of it as a policing issue. It is actually a lack of regulation and a lack of ensuring compliance to rules and regulations. This is where we see a weakness of the State.”
In the NPA’s annual report for 2020/2021, members of the South African Anti-Money Laundering Integrated Task Force, prosecutors from the dedicated tax component, obtained 113 convictions from 115 verdict cases (98.3% conviction rate) and in recoveries in corruption and related matters: The AFU obtained recoveries in the amount of R117 million in corruption matters.