Pretoria - It is now hoped that the marathon trial of Mamelodi businessman Vusi “Khekhe” Mathibela and his three accomplices will be concluded in August.
The matter was yet again postponed yesterday in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria.
Yesterday’s brief appearance of the four comes after the court in May provisionally postponed the matter to pave the way further for the trial.
Mathibela, Sipho Patrick Hudla, Robert Mutapa and Bonginkosi Paul Khumalo were more than a year ago convicted of the 2015 killing of billionaire businessman Wandile Bozwana, but they are yet to be sentenced.
One of the big issues was that advocate Anneline van den Heever, who appeared for Hudla and Mutapa, was ill on numerous occasions. She then announced through her instructing attorney that she was withdrawing from the case.
Judge Papi Mosopa was not happy during the previous proceedings about the manner in which she simply announced her withdrawal, without doing so in court. He ordered that she had to be in court yesterday, to explain herself. But Van den Heever did not pitch.
This prompted prosecutor Jennifer Cronje to tell the court that in the State’s opinion the advocate was in contempt of court.
Judge Mosopa questioned whether it was not an ethical issue. He undertook to take the matter up with the Johannesburg Society of Advocates, of which Van den Heever is a member.
The social worker, who had compiled pre-sentencing reports regarding the four, also did not pitch at court on the previous occasion. This had caused the court to issue a warrant for her arrest, which was held over to yesterday.
The social worker came to court to explain that she was ill and she handed a sick note to the court, which resulted in the warrant being cancelled.
The trial was postponed to August 22 to 25, when the four will present evidence in mitigation of sentence. The prosecution indicated that they would call witnesses, including Bozwana’s wife and family members, to testify in aggravation of sentence.
The judge earlier said three of the group had been awaiting trial in jail since their arrest in 2015, and it was not in the interests of justice that they had to wait for so long to get certainty about their future.
He said he was an acting judge when the trial started in 2017, and was now a fully appointed judge. He also commented that the four were convicted in June last year, yet still waiting for their matter to be finalised.
Bozwana’s widow, Tsholofelo Bozwana, and his business partner, Mpho Baloyi, who was shot during the murder, were awaiting closure. Both were also waiting for their victim impact reports to be handed to court as part of the pre-sentencing proceedings.
Bozwana’s widow told the Pretoria News the family needed closure and that each time she had to return to court, old wounds opened. Bozwana was gunned down in 2015 on the Garsfontein off-ramp off the N1 when he and Baloyi returned from shopping.
Pretoria News