Lobby group to pursue Motsepe-Radebe’s Botswana case

Head of AfriForum’s private prosecution team Gerrie Nel has promised Botswana he will leave no stone unturned in looking for prosecutable grounds in which SA businesswoman Bridgette Motsepe-Radebe is implicated. A City Press report says Nel and his team were in Botswana last week after they were appointed by Botswana’s Public Prosecutor to assist with what now appears to be a weakening state case, in which at least two charges against the main accused, former spy agent Wilhelmina Maswabi, code-named ‘Butterfly’, were withdrawn. They were expected to spend the whole week in Botswana, engaged in pretrial matters, combing through loads of evidence and meeting several people with interests in the case, including witnesses, the investigating team, prosecutions and other involved law enforcement agencies in the country. Maswabi was expected back in court in August on charges of unexplained possession of property and false declaration of a passport, and Nel and his team were expected to represent the state then. Charges for financing terrorism were withdrawn in November.

On the report from an independent investigation commissioned by Motsepe-Radebe – in which she was exonerated from allegations of having been a signatory to some bank accounts in which part of the $10bn (R143bn) stolen from the Botswana Government was stored in SA – Nel said this did not mean much to him. The report by the London-based international law firm, Omnia Strategy, and business intelligence and investigation firm, Alaco, punched holes in the October 2019 affidavit by Botswana’s Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime investigator, Jako Hubona, who implicated Motsepe-Radebe. City Press has reported on the denial by at least two South African banks, Absa and Nedbank, that they had any of the bank accounts referred to by Hubona. Letters from the banks, stating that the alleged accounts were non-existent or untraceable, were seen. ‘I’ve never been impressed by an accused person getting a team to exonerate them … When you start investigating the matter, when you start prosecuting, the accused person will always indicate that they’ve done nothing wrong and if they get a team to exonerate them, they can do that. For me, it will first (be to) evaluate and analyse the available evidence,’ Nel said.