Wendy Jasson da Costa
CONTROVERSIAL business tycoon Shauwn Mpisane, who is accused of tax fraud, launches a counter-attack against Sars this week in a court application aimed at having a raid on her luxury La Lucia home declared unlawful.
Mpisane will allege that Sars officials tried to bribe her and her former metro policeman husband, Sbu, and that the affidavit on which the search warrant was authorised has gone missing from the court.
She is out on bail of R50 000 after a June court appearance following her arrest on several tax offences involving R2.4m.
Mpisane and her company, Zikhulise Cleaning, Maintenance and Transport, face charges of fraud, forgery for allegedly submitting false VAT invoices and under-declaring VAT.
She has also been charged with contravening the Close Corporations Act by managing a business in spite of being disqualified from doing so because she has a previous conviction for tax fraud.
Yesterday, Mpisane’s lawyer, Themba Mjoli, said the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, Barry Madolo, would meet prosecutor Meera Naidu and the investigating team today to find out why the affidavit was not supplied to them.
Mjoli said if the issue was not resolved today then advocate Jimmy Howse would launch an urgent court application tomorrow to compel the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to hand over the documents.
“I can’t understand why the state has delayed so much; we are entitled to it,” said Mjoli.
He initially requested the affidavit on June 28, and in July Naidu promised to give it to him, but he had still not had sight of it. In a letter to the head of the NPA’s specialised tax unit, Mjoli said Naidu, who promised to supply the document, later said it was in Pretoria and that a request for it would be academic since the State did not intend using any of the documents seized in the raid and his clients were thus not likely to suffer prejudice.
Mjoli then asked the chief magistrate for a copy of the search warrant and the supporting affidavit, but the documents could not be found.
Mjoli said there were other grounds (besides whether the state would use the confiscated documents) on which they wanted to challenge the search and seizure.
A spokesman for the Mpisanes, Vuyo Babalo Mkhize, said his clients felt they had been “victimised” by Sars after they voluntarily went there during the amnesty period to resolve their tax issues last year. He said it was clear from the raid that “Sars was out to humiliate them in public”.
Mkhize claims that at the time of the raid the Mpisanes believed they were “under attack” after about 15 members of the police’s Hawks unit, all in plain clothes, “climbed over walls, and disarmed their guards”.
He said the situation “could have turned into an armed confrontation” as Sbu Mpisane had already drawn his gun, but his wife saw police cars in the street through a window and realised who it was.
The Mpisanes have also claimed that a Sars official from Pretoria tried to solicit a bribe of R4m from them.
In a letter to Mjoli, Naidu says attempts to assist the Mpisanes, based on the allegation, were “firmly declined by Shauwn”.
In his letter to the NPA, Mjoli denies this and says his client was “frustrated by the approach of Sars throughout”. He claims she had also given Sars a video recording of the meeting with the official and the “solicitation of the bribe”.
The Mpisanes also want police to investigate members of the Hawks, led by a Captain Kenney, who allegedly tried to threaten them into assisting the police “nail” their friend, police commissioner Bheki Cele.
However, in a letter to Mjoli, Naidu said Kenney was not part of her investigating team and that he was only brought in to assist with the search warrant. “Any other involvement with your clients subsequent to this event does not form part of the investigation of this case.”
However, in his letter Mjoli said they had sworn statements from several people who were approached by Kenney for statements and that he did not understand why she wanted to distance herself from him.
Yesterday Sars spokesman Adrian Lackay said the Mpisanes were “fully entitled to… approach the courts of law if there’s a deadlock with us”.