Wanted: finance sleuths to rebuild Hawks arsenal
● Newly appointed Hawks commander Lt-Gen Godfrey Lebeya is on a massive recruitment drive to draw back hundreds of officers to tackle corruption and organised crime investigations more effectively.
“From 2015, we lost no less than 104 officers who were highly experienced in financial investigations. There are 229 positions which have been advertised internally, which we want filled by competent officers who are knowledgeable and experienced in investigations into state capture,” said Lebeya.
The state capture investigations that Lebeya wants undertaken include not only those being aired in the Zondo commission of inquiry, but also those that are off the public radar, especially ones that involve the irregular awarding of municipal tenders.
Part of Lebeya’s turnaround strategy for the Hawks is to create specialised task teams headed and staffed by officers who were either purged, sidelined or forced into retirement during the tenure or former Hawks head Berning Ntlemeza.
Maj-Gen Senaba Mosipi, who was among them, will head the teams conducting various state capture investigations.
Already a group of hand-picked officers have been despatched by Lebeya to KwaZulu-Natal to investigate several municipalities.
Last month, in a briefing to parliament’s portfolio committee on police, Lebeya — who took command of the Hawks in June — admitted the organisation was struggling to deal with serious commercial crime cases after the loss of highly experienced officers.
Parliamentarians hammered him over the lack of progress in the Hawks’ corruption investigations into the Steinhoff saga, VBS Mutual Bank and the Guptas.
The three cases alone are said to have cost the economy billions of rands.
Lebeya said his turnaround strategy included weeding out corrupt officials. He said the key to getting good officers back was to deal with current members’ grievances, especially about corruption and mismanagement. “We have lost a lot of capacity for various reasons.”
Lebeya said he had a zero-tolerance approach to corruption.
“All our members know this. What is coming out of the commission, in terms of allegations of cases being squashed and perceptions of political interference in investigations, is being probed and dealt with.
“Where we come across errors we act and correct them. We have already suspended the head of the anti-corruption unit, Maj-Gen Zinhle Mnonopi. Whenever we are convinced there is a conclusive case we deal with it.
“We are conducting our own internal investigations and disciplinary processes and have referred matters to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate. Obviously we are not making public pronouncements on everything that we are doing.”
On allegations of tardiness around investigations into VBS, Steinhoff and the Guptas, Lebeya said the Hawks were adopting different approaches on how investigations would be conducted.
“We have many good investigators who are advising us on what we can do differently. In the past some people may have used a traditional way of investigation where you only rely on individuals, as opposed to teams. We are resorting to teams because investigations can be speeded up as you no longer have to have a single officer taking over 100 statements, which takes time.”
He said some of the cases the teams were working on included those involving municipal tender irregularities in KwaZulu-Natal.
“We have dispatched highly specialised and experienced people there. They include officers who were lost to the Hawks.”
Lebeya said his whole approach to turning the Hawks around was to ensure the unit was effective and capacitated with proper and correct resources.
“And that’s what we are doing.”