Sizani in battle with magistrate

PORTIA “Pankie” Sizani, wife of South Africa’s ambassador to Germany, Stone Sizani, resorted to the Grahamstown High Court yesterday in a bid to review a magistrate’s decision not to recuse himself from her fraud and money laundering trial.

Her counsel, Advocate Johan Wessels, said there was much to substantiate Sizani’s subjective perception that the magistrate presiding in her R1.2-million fraud trial, Mputumi Mpofu, was biased against her.

He argued that it was largely because of the way in which Mpofu always ruled against Sizani during her trial that she had developed her perception of bias.

Mpofu had not been open to argument or persuasion even when direct evidence of undisputable fact had been placed before him, Wessels said.

The 49-year-old former Department of Education early childhood development district coordinator, stands accused of defrauding the department by creating “ghost” teachers and pocketing their salaries in 2009-10.

It was argued during the recusal application last year that part of Mpofu’s bias had developed due to his own wife’s working for the Department of Education.

But Mpofu had pointed out that his wife had stopped working for the department in 2013.

Advocate Albert Beyleveld SC, for Mpofu, said it could not be argued that Mpofu had not applied his mind to argument in each separate decision.

“This was not the attitude of a magistrate who is prejudicing the accused because he is biased.”

Sizani’s trial in the Port Elizabeth Commercial Crimes Court was in September postponed to February.

Judges Jeremy Pickering and Gerald Bloem reserved judgment.