Axed Sars boss lying - Cele
|Published
Disgraced Sars commissioner Oupa Magashula File photo: Simphiwe Mbokazi Disgraced Sars commissioner Oupa Magashula File photo: Simphiwe Mbokazi
Johannesburg - Former national police commissioner Bheki Cele has accused the disgraced Sars commissioner Oupa Magashula of lying, saying he was in Johannesburg when the former taxman claimed he had been with Cele in Durban.
Cele is questioning why he was not invited to testify before the committee after Magashula dragged his name into the controversy that ended the career of the first black taxman.
Magashula resigned last week following the release of a scathing report by retired Constitutional Court Judge Zak Yacoob and advocate Muzi Sikhakhane, which showed that he had misled the commission.
The two were asked by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan to probe the relationship between Magashula and convicted drug dealer Timmie Marimuthu after newspaper reports revealed a telephone conversation between them and 28-year-old chartered accountant Nosipho Mba, where Magashula offered her a R700 000 a year job.
In his report, Yacoob said Magashula should have been more frank with the committee, given the integrity associated with his position. He recommended a full disciplinary inquiry. At the inquiry Magashula’s version of how, and how many times he had met Marimuthu changed several times. But it appears that was not the only questionable statement made by Magashula. He claimed, in an affidavit sent to the committee, to have met Cele and Marimuthu at the time the incriminating phone call was recorded. But Cele disputes this – and has produced a ticket stub from a flight between Johannesburg and Durban to prove it. Cele’s flight stub insinuates that he was not at the May 14, 2011, meeting.
The stub points to Cele’s flight from OR Tambo International Airport to Durban having taken place at 4.55pm.
But another annexure – an e-mail sent from Mba to Magashula, which was sent at 5.08pm – shows the meeting took place before 5pm, and that Cele was in Johannesburg at the time.
“This is conclusive proof that General Cele could not have met, and did not meet, Mr Magashula ‘on the afternoon of May 14 at a fish shop at Umhlanga’,” said his spokesman, Vuyo Mkhize, yesterday.
“More to the point, given the thrust of the lie that Mr Magashula has been peddling about Mr Cele, it proves that Mr Cele could not have been, and was not, present when Mr Magashula spoke to Ms Mba, telephonically, sometime before 17h08 that day,” said Mkhize.
Cele felt he should have been contacted to be part of the inquiry, said Mkhize.
The affidavits in which Cele’s name is mentioned have been uploaded on to the government website.
Mkhize told The Sunday Independent that Cele had planned to seek legal advice on the recourse he may have for the distribution of the affidavit which, he said, prejudiced him.
Magashula did not respond to calls and SMSes.
Judge Yacoob, speaking to The Sunday Independent, said that the committee’s report was completed and that the processes that needed to follow the recommendations needed to go ahead.
Finance spokesman Jabulani Sikhakhane said the minister had appointed a committee to investigate and it was not he who decided who should be called before the committee.
Sars’s Adrian Lackay said the minister had instructed the revenue service’s audit committee to investigate whether the former commissioner’s behaviour had breached any of the tax and customs processes at the service.
The audit committee would be convened this week for a second time.
He said that the audit committee’s investigations would allow for new information that fell outside of the initial fact-finding inquiry to be examined.
candice.bailey@inl.co.za
Sunday Independent