Hawks: inside intrigue
ITHOUT a word she (KZN police commissioner M m a m o n n y e Ngobeni [PC] ) took me to her boardroom and there, to my amazement, was Panday and what looked like an army of advocates.
I felt as if I’d walked into an ambush.
Panday – a small man – was immaculate in a pinstriped suit and red tie.
He asked Johan why Subramoney had been checking his bank accounts without a Section 205 subpoena.
Half of Johan thought: “Who is this little twit?” The other half wondered how on earth he’d found out. Who had leaked? The bank, a magistrate, someone on the investigating team? It was as if Panday had read the report he’d given Ngobeni and Ntanjana ( late MajorBonga n i Ntanjana - KZN’s deputy police commissioner).
I told them it would be foolish of Subramoney to conduct such an investigation without a 205.
Then they accused him of trying to extort money from Panday to stop the investigation. It was clearly an attempt to discredit Subramoney as an investigator. Johan could scarcely believe it when the PC instructed him to stop investigating Panday and start investigating Subramoney instead.
I asked for proof of the extortion attempt from Panday, which one of his lawyers agreed to supply.
It came a few days later in the form of a written statement, saying Panday had received an anonymous call asking him for a million rand to make the case disappear.
It wasn’t proof at all. Nonetheless I was ordered to open a docket against Subramoney.
A week after the Panday meeting, on 28 June 2010, Johan received a call from the National Police Commissioner, who had heard about the investigation from [then Hawks general Anwar] Dramat.
Bheki Cele instructed me to take charge of the investigation and not to entertain interference.
I knew that he and General Ngobeni had once been very close; I wasn’t sure what had prompted this. There must have been other dynamics at play.
Cele told Johan that independent forensic auditors would be appointed.
Johan wrote to [SAPS] finance, instructing them to freeze the payout of Panday’s [seized] remaining money, a further R15 million.
One night a month or so later Ngobeni phoned just as Johan was having dinner at a restaurant on Durban’s Bluff. She was agitated. She told Johan she heard Panday was making a statement against her. Did he know anything about it?
He didn’t, but reckoned Panday, via Madhoe, was threatening to expose the donation to her husband’s birthday party, unless the investigation was stopped and his R15 million was released by the SAPS finance department.
He told her to calm down and assured her that Panday had made no such statement.
She kept repeating: “Are you sure? Are you sure?”
For a supposedly innocent person he thought she sounded very guilty.
Encouraged by Bheki Cele’s go-ahead, Johan told the Hawks to obtain search warrants for Panday’s house, business premises and vehicles.
And in an unprecedented move, warrants for SAPS HQ itself.
They would need specific documents from Supply Chain Management as well as Madhoe’s laptop.
For this Johan’s team recruited Hawks commercial crime experts from Pietermaritzburg and Port Shepstone to make sure the warrant was executed correctly.
I was apprehensive about searching HQ without the PC’s knowledge.
I visualised her reaction when officers ultimately under her command burst in and began searching her building. I had to be tactical. He told the men to assemble at 6am on the same day that he and General Ngobeni were due to attend a parliamentary lekgotla in Umbilo.
As they walked into the lekgotla at 9am, he took a pre-arranged phone call then informed her that HQ was being searched.
There was nothing she could do. She was about to report back to the KZN parliament about the state of crime in the province. She was trapped.
But by the time the investigators got to Panday’s house, he wasn’t there – they suspected he’d been alerted.
When they phoned him, he said he was in Newcastle, three hours away.
They informed him they would spend the day at his house if necessary. He was there within the hour. Incriminating documents were seized.
During the raids a copy of Johan’s report was found in Madhoe’s car.
When Johan later asked Ngobeni how this confidential document could have ended up with Madhoe, suspecting that she’d given Madhoe her copy, she brushed him aside: “Anyone could’ve given it to him.”
According to Cato Manor detective Mossie Mostert, Panday approached him a few weeks later offering to pay him to destroy evidence.
At first Mostert didn’t know who he was: “I got this phone call from a guy saying he needed to tell me something. I thought he had information. I arranged to meet him at a garage. When I got there I realised I’d met him before through a colleague. He said he needed my help and explained that he’d been accused of fraud.”
Panday wanted Mostert to steal the documents seized from his office.
He told him exactly where they were being stored, a supposedly secret location, as well as the file numbers.
If he couldn’t get his hands on them, Panday said, he should set the building alight.
Mostert refused: “I said I couldn’t do that and he said: ‘name your price’. I suspected it was a set-up and I phoned General Booysen.”
[Alerted, Panday avoided implicating himself in the months following].
At the end of 2010, Panday took SAPS to court to have the subpoenas overturned, but his application was eventually dismissed with costs.
Panday failed to get the Section 205s set aside, failed to get Ngobeni to stop the investigation and failed to get Mostert to destroy evidence.
But it would be his final attempt to save himself that was the most extraordinary of all.
As far as I was concerned I had an unblemished 38-year career in the police. I was against corruption. I found it incredible that they thought they could bribe me.