Durban — The trial against former eThekwini Municipality mayor Zandile Gumede and others will continue in the Durban High Court on Monday.
City Integrity and Investigations Unit (CIIU) head, Mbuso Ngcobo, will continue being cross-examined by the defence.
On Thursday, the matter was adjourned due to a lack of the minutes of a meeting between the CIIU and Investigations and Forensic Solutions (IFS).
The IFS recommended a criminal investigation based on the stack of documents that the CIIU received anonymously, about tender irregularities.
Gumede and her co-accused face more than 2 000 charges, including conspiracy to commit corruption, corruption, fraud, money laundering, racketeering, contravention of the Municipal Finance Management Act and contravention of the Municipal Systems Act; amounting to more than R300 million in relation to a DSW tender.
Ngcobo is a witness and told the court about the process in which the unit approves what can be investigated or not.
Ngcobo clarified how the stack of documents received anonymously got into being approved to be lodged as a complaint and how the probe was approved to go ahead.
Advocate Jay Naidoo, representing Gumede and others, asked him to explain the process by which the documents would launch an internal investigation.
“Once the complaint has been lodged an assessor will look at it, then it goes to their supervisors. There are different stages in which a report goes through before it gets to me. There is a legal team which also looks at the report and then it goes to my deputy head and then it comes to me for approval and that is when I sign. All these people signed the document before it got to me,” he explained.
Naidoo asked Ngcobo why the head of the legal team’s signature did not appear on the document and he told the court that the legal team does not sign the document like how it appeared in the document he was carrying in court. He said this happens in all the matters that they work on. Naidoo questioned the date and time of how the document went through different stages and landed in Ngcobo’s hands for his approval.
“Is this the general policy in your unit for a complainant to lodge a complaint and it gets to you in 24 hours? According to the date and time in the documents this was received at 15h50 in the afternoon and this assessment was done in 10 minutes,” he said.
Ngcobo said it differs on days, as sometimes they would receive a lot of complaints and sometimes only one. However, he said he could not answer on behalf of the people who did the assessment because he was not there. He added when documents get to him for signature, he does not look at when the complaint was received; his responsibility is to check if it is in order.
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