By Angela Quintal and Wendy Jasson da Costa
While Schabir Shaik spends his first weekend in jail, another prominent jailed South African, Tony Yengeni, has a weekend pass to spend two days with his family at home.
Eleven weeks after beginning his four-year jail sentence for fraud, Yengeni is a free man this weekend.
The former ANC chief whip is on his first parole weekend, and will be on parole every weekend - including the Christmas and New Year weekends - until his release. He is expected to be a free man in just more than two months.
On Saturday and Sunday he will be with his family, confined to his Milnerton home in Cape Town - a sure sign that he has a firm release date. He is expected to be released under correctional supervision on January 15.
Parole review board head Judge Siraj Desai said that if the parole board at Malmesbury Prison confirmed Yengeni's release in January, this would be "entirely consistent with policy" and not a sign that Yengeni was receiving preferential treatment.
The decision on whether to release Yengeni on parole would not be made by the Correctional Services Minister Ngconde Balfour, but by the local parole board, which would also decide on the conditions of his parole.
Should he violate any of the weekend parole conditions, however, he will be back in jail, and should there be any objections, these could be lodged with the minister, who would then refer it to the parole review board, Desai said.
The Department of Correctional Services said it released on weekend parole 80 to 90 offenders a month who had received a date for release under correctional supervision.
A total of 22 offenders benefited from this in the Western Cape this month, with three this weekend alone, spokesman Manelisi Wolela said.
They were Yengeni, Wynand du Toit and Jan Conradie.
This is because the three men were all sentenced under Section 276 (1) of the Criminal Procedure Act that provided for conversion of sentences into community corrections after serving only a sixth of their sentences as inmates.
Yengeni also benefited from a 20-month amnesty announced by President Thabo Mbeki last year for all prisoners serving time for non-violent crimes.
Another correctional services spokesman, Luphumzo Kebeni, said Yengeni appeared before the Malmesbury case management committee at the beginning of the month and it had recommended he be freed early next year.
"That has not been approved or finalised because it still has to be endorsed by the parole board," he said.
Kebeni said it was not a foregone conclusion that Yengeni would be released because "occasionally" the recommendations of the case management committee were turned down by the parole board.
The parole board would only know how many cases it had by the end of this month and would then start looking into it.
Yengeni's lawyer Marius du Toit said last night: "I'll be glad for Tony if he's released in January. Let's hope it happens."
While he'd had no direct contact with Yengeni since he had been jailed, he had been in contact with Yengeni's wife, Lumka, and family.
Du Toit said January 15 had been speculated as a possible release date.