Cape Town - National police commissioner Riah Phiyega may soon find herself taking the witness stand to testify in a court case involving a colonel who uncovered what he alleges was evidence suggesting rampant corruption in the Crime Intelligence unit.
Johan Roos, previously an internal auditor in Crime Intelligence and responsible for auditing the SA Secret Service account, is applying for a contempt of court order against the police service, Police Minister Nkosinathi Nhleko and Phiyega.
He is accusing Phiyega of defying a court order by blocking him from returning to work in the Crime Intelligence division.
The hearing is expected to resume in the Labour Court in Joburg next month, when Phiyega may take the witness stand to explain why Roos was not redeployed to the position from which he was transferred after lifting the lid on alleged corruption.
In an order relating to the case, the Labour Court noted: “It is common cause that Roos has not been placed in a position in the internal audit section of Crime Intelligence.
“The primary factual issues that the court is required to decide, it seems to me… are whether there was a direct order from the national commissioner that Roos was to be placed in a position outside Crime Intelligence, and whether there is in fact a post available in the internal audit section.”
Roos and the police heads had filed court papers relating to the contempt of court application, but the order said oral evidence would be a better way of dealing with the matter, especially in trying to determine whether Phiyega had directly ordered that Roos be placed outside the Crime Intelligence unit.
Roos’s contempt of court application stems from a order handed down in April in which the Labour Court said he should be redeployed, preferably in the section in Crime Intelligence in which he had worked before.
According to papers before the court, Roos was told that all relevant posts in Crime Intelligence had been filled. He disputed this.
The papers say the dispute between Roos and his bosses began 10 years ago after Roos, then-head of Crime Intelligence’s internal audit department, uncovered apparent discrepancies in the Secret Service fund.
He was later told he would be transferred to a unit that had yet to be created. Roos then turned to the courts to be reinstated in his original job.
The Labour Court’s judgment in April noted that Roos had been sidelined by colleagues and targeted. It said that between 2005 and 2010 his home had been burgled and notes about his investigations stolen.
Weekend Argus