Manager, accomplice up for US$36 000 fraud

A MANAGER at a local firm, Ashworth Chiringa, together with his accomplice Simbarashe Chitate, have appeared in court for allegedly defrauding their employer of US$36 000 by creating their own billing system.

Chiringa (45) and Chitate (21) appeared before Harare magistrate Mrs Ruth Moyo charged with fraud and were remanded to March 19 on US$200 bail each.

The complainant is ETG Curechem (Pvt) Ltd being represented by Tinashe Rujuwa.

ETG Curechem has an explosive storage magazine in Mutorashanga and sells explosives from that magazine with payments done through the finance department which reports to Chiringa.

Prosecutor, Mr Rufaro Chonzi alleged that in June last year, Chiringa was hired as an explosive manager by ETG Curechem and his key duties were sales and marketing of explosives.

The company used SAP accounting systems where sales invoices were to be followed by the sales team to ensure every customer who purchased the explosives was issued with an invoice that would be entered into the SAP system as a replica of the manual invoice.

The company had also put in place a credit facility where clients would apply for the facility and have it approved first before making any purchase on credit.

The court heard that Chiringa allegedly created his own system where he would generate manual invoices to collect stocks from the magazine master and would then cause the manual invoices not to be entered into the SAP system.

He went on to tear off the invoices of such sales from the invoice book.

Chiringa and Chitate would then collect the stocks, sell them and take the money for their personal use.

It is alleged that Chiringa would also instruct the magazine master to release some stock to his customers and team up with Chitate to collect the money from such customers.

Chiringa also sold some of the stocks to his customers and took the money on the pretext that such customers had bought on credit. Chiringa and others would then collect cash from such customers and they would share it among themselves.

The offence came to light when the company made a follow-up of the payment on the customers who were alleged to have bought on credit but discovered that customers had bought from Chiringa and Chitate using cash.

The money was collected by Chitate and two others who are still at large.

This prompted the company to conduct some preliminary investigations.

This is when they discovered that other customers who were alleged to have bought on credit did not exist and as a result they suffered prejudice of US$38 652 and nothing was recovered.