MOM ON THE RUN
Law catches up with thief after 14 years
● Wendy McGee has walked free with a dark secret for 14 years.
After lodging an appeal when she was convicted of looting her employer’s coffers, the Kempton Park mother slipped through the cracks of the justice system. She remarried, bought a house and had two more children.
But the law finally caught up with her. McGee, 43, appeared in the Kempton Park Magistrate’s Court this week after police eventually rearrested her last year.
Over the course of a decade, McGee, a credit manager, stole R1.5-million from her company, mining equipment manufacturer Multotec, by rerouting supplier payments into her bank account. In 2004 she pleaded guilty to 26 counts of fraud and was sentenced to 15 years in jail, five of which were suspended for three years.
She was granted leave to appeal her sentence and given bail. But when McGee’s appeal was finally due to be heard in 2012 — eight years after her conviction — her legal team failed to appear or file any paperwork.
The matter was struck from the roll and she was ordered to report to prison to start serving her sentence, said NPA spokeswoman Phindi Louw.
But it seems McGee didn’t get the memo. And it took police five years to track her down — despite the fact that she lived 6km from the court that first sentenced her.
A former colleague at Multotec, Thomas Holtz, said it appeared McGee, who was 29 when she was convicted, continued to live her life “as if nothing had happened”.
Holtz, who is now the company’s CEO, said it had taken years to realise McGee was stealing money. “She was quite astute at figuring out how to get money out. It’s a classic white-collar crime story.”
The company had initially been open to her paying back the money in instalments. Holtz said the court had also ordered her to do so, but McGee had said she wasn’t able to. Despite this, she bought a house in Kempton Park in 2007 for R1.45-million.
Following her rearrest, “we had a request from a welfare officer if we would accept an offer of her repaying the money”. But when the company said it should include interest, McGee said she could not afford that.
“We felt very strongly that she would do it again and felt it needed to be dealt with appropriately,” Holtz said.
McGee declined to speak to the Sunday Times. Her advocate, SW van der Merwe, said she could not be blamed as she had not received notice of her appeal date.
“She most definitely did not get notice because she moved [when] she got married. Although the allegation against Ms McGee is that she was the one [delaying] the appeal, nothing was done by the state. Then they placed it on the roll, gave inadequate notice, she was unaware thereof and then the next moment she gets arrested.”
Authorities are passing the buck for the blunder.
The NPA’s Louw said tracing McGee after her appeal was struck off the roll had been the responsibility of police.
Kempton Park police spokesman Captain Jethro Mtshali said the file had been sent to the organised crime unit in Germiston. However, this week the unit referred queries to the Hawks — who in turn said the issue of the arrest and appeal could only be answered by the NPA.
In September the High Court in Johannesburg set aside McGee’s sentence and referred the case back to the magistrate’s court to consider a new sentence given McGee’s “present personal circumstances, and the best interests of the minor children”.
A source close to the case said the referral was unusual.
“The magistrate feels he will simply be reviewing his own decision and is seeking direction on how to proceed.”