Syed Mohiudeen outside the High Court in Gqeberha after he sought an adjournment of his application for a review to hear further details relating to the criminal proceedings against him and his co-accused Mthuthuzeli Swartz for the alleged theft of 42km of railway line in the Eastern Cape. Photo: Thamsanqa Mbovane
- In 2019, former acting PRASA CEO Mthuthuzeli Swartz and businessman Syed Mohiudeen were arrested for allegedly illegally selling the Transnet railway line in the Eastern Cape.
- The criminal proceedings came to a halt after Mohiudeen asked the Supreme Court to review the magistrate’s decision not to disclose further details of the charges against him.
- After 18 months, the Gqeberha High Court heard the review application for the first time on Thursday.
- However, the review was adjourned because Mohiudeen, who did not have legal representation, claimed he had not had time to read the state’s response to his arguments.
An application for a review of criminal proceedings involving the theft of a 42km stretch of railway track in the Eastern Cape was adjourned in the Gqeberha High Court on Thursday, involving an alleged theft by a former acting CEO of PRASA and a Cape Town businessman.
This was the first time that the review petition filed by Syed Mohiudeen was heard, 18 months after the petition was filed in the Supreme Court in February 2023.
Mohiudeen is jointly charged with Mthuthuzeli Swartz. Swartz was PRASA’s regional director for the Western Cape when a case was opened at Elliot police station in the Eastern Cape in February 2013 for the theft of a Transnet railway line between Sterkstroom and Maclear.
It took six years until Swartz was arrested on January 22, 2019 and Mohiudeen on February 27, 2019.
It is alleged that Swartz and Mohiudeen, represented by his company Spanish Ice, accepted a R1.5 million deposit from their Cape Town cousins Adrian and Cedric Samuels for the sale of the disused Transnet railway line, which the Samuels cousins then bought for its steel value.
In the period between the initiation of the investigation and Swartz’s arrest, PRASA appointed him acting CEO. He held this position for three months, from January to April 2018, until the PRASA board dismissed him because insurers would not provide liability insurance for directors and officers.
The criminal proceedings, which had been plagued by delays even before the review application, partly due to legal shifts by Mohiudeen and difficulties in obtaining court transcripts, stalled after Mohiudeen applied to the High Court for a review of Justice Nolitha Bara’s rejection of his application for further details of the charges against him. He also contests the R58-million claim against Transnet for damages arising from the line’s removal.
Mohiudeen’s arguments were filed on June 3 this year. As he told the court on Thursday, his niece in London had helped him draft them.
When Mohiudeen appeared before Justice Avinash Govindjee and Acting Judge Nicholas Mullins in the High Court on Thursday, he asked for an adjournment so he could be represented by counsel. He said he had only received the State’s response papers that morning. Since his criminal case began, Mohiudeen has changed lawyers at least four times, with his most recent attempt to be represented by counsel being rejected by Legal Aid.
Mohiudeen said the legal aid informed him of its decision on August 1. Judge Govindjee gave the reason at the time that the legal aid considered his application had “no real prospect of success”.
Prosecutor Bongo Mvinjelwa argued that a postponement would lead to further delays in the criminal proceedings before the Economic Offences Court, which would be “detrimental to the state”.
Mvinjelwa said Mohiudeen was represented by counsel when he made his application to the Supreme Court and the matter was addressed in the arguments before the court.
He said Mohiudeen’s request was baseless and he was using “Stalingrad tactics” to delay the criminal proceedings.
After a 15-minute adjournment, Justice Govindjee ruled that the case would be adjourned despite “suspicions of Stalingrad tactics.” Although the State’s response was sent to the MLA on July 23, it appeared that it was sent to Mohiudeen only after the MLA’s decision to reject his application for representation, and he needed time to familiarise himself with the legal arguments.
A new date for the hearing was set for November 28.
Outside court, Mohiudeen said he was accused of something he never did.
He said he did not expect to be in court without legal representation. “I was duped,” he said.
“The Samuels are the ones who stole the railing and got permission from Swartz,” he said, adding, “Without the correct information, I cannot plead.”
He said the Apartheid Criminal Procedure Act was being used against him and that it was a “trial through the media” that had ruined his reputation.
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article as long as you credit the authors and GroundUp and do not alter the text. Please include a link to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools reside solely on our servers. We do not share our logs with third parties. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use IP addresses identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits. do not track Users. When you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.
