Pretoria - The National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) former CEO, Advocate Karen van Rensburg, told the Pretoria North Magistrate’s Court that former NPA prosecutor and now Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Glynnis Breytenbach was warned about possible charges she could face if she deleted official files on her work laptop.
Van Rensburg is the State’s first witness against Breytenbach and her former attorney, Gerhard Wagenaar, on charges of contravening the NPA Act and for defeating the end of justice for allegedly shredding work-related documents and deleting her private files on her work laptop.
The former NPA CEO, who was then acting CO at the time in 2012, told the court that Breytenbach was informed beforehand about the applicable regulations around deletion of data on her company laptop and the necessary authorisation needed to do so.
Breytenbach’s legal representative Barry Roux questioned the NPA policy on data management and its compatibility with the related NPA Act during his cross-examination of van Rensburg.
Roux also challenged van Rensburg on the policy’s “lack of clarity” on who was supposed to authorise requests to clear any information on the NPA computers.
However, the former CEO maintained that for any NPA employee to delete files on their work computers, necessary authorisation from someone more senior to the person making the request was needed and it would be poor governance for anyone to do the authorisation themselves.
“No officer can authorise himself or herself, that would be poor governance. For an example, I would need an authorisation from above as a CEO to remove some files from my laptop, I cannot authorise myself,” Van Rensburg told the court during re-examination by the prosecution.
The state also called on its second witness, NPA Information Technology Services Manager, Mukondeleli Ravhudzi, who was on the stand for just a few minutes after telling the court that she was the one responsible for authorising access for NPA service providers upon receiving clearance security vetting.
State Prosecutor, Raymond Mathenjwa proposed that the matter be adjourned until Tuesday as he had only prepared two witnesses because most of the state’s witnesses were from the NPA and were drawn from their offices.
African News Agency