Court takes hard line on white-collar crime

Acting Judge Dirk Uijs jailed the men for an effective eight and seven years respectively. ‘You let society down very, very badly,’ he said as he handed down the sentences in the Cape High Court. He granted both men leave to go to the Supreme Court of Appeal to challenge conviction and sentence, and extended their bail, says a Mail & Guardian Online report. Uijs sentenced Gardener to 12 years in jail, of which four were suspended, and Mitchell to 12 years of which five were suspended. The men, former joint CEs of the company, were convicted last month on charges of fraud involving a total of R12m, related to their undisclosed interest in a German gym operation that LeisureNet bought out in 1999. Full Mail & Guardian Online report

Uijs did not give them the minimum sentence. He told them that the fact that they had paid over the money, plus an additional R4.5m, to LeisureNet\'s liquidators was ‘the best thing you did’, and meant that they had to an extent already been punished, according to Business Report. He found that this was a ‘substantial and compelling’ reason not to impose the 15-year minimum sentence laid down in the Criminal Procedure Act for fraud involving more than R500 000. Uijs said both men were to all intents first offenders – Gardener has a previous conviction for VAT fraud but this was also related to LeisureNet – and the fact they had clean records indicated they were not criminals by nature. However, the bottom line was that they unlawfully took a total of R12m from the coffers of a public company. Full report in Business Report

He said their fraud did not actually cause LeisureNet a loss equivalent to their gain, and he could not find that what they did led directly to the demise of the company, says a report on the Mail & Guardian Online site. ‘Nevertheless, to walk away from a deception with R6m in each of your pockets is a very, very serious offence, that despite the fact that you paid it all back.’ He said he was not impressed by the defence\'s call for fines and suspended sentences. This would be a message to the public that the rich could pay for their misdeeds like paying for groceries. Addressing Gardener, he said: ‘The question which has sat in my head ever since the day I found you guilty is, why? What did you need to do this for, or for what did you need to do this? You were independently wealthy.’ Exactly the same went for Mitchell, he said. Full report on Mail & Guardian Online site