Christelle Stemmet: Top anti-corruption cop 1972-2019
● Col Christelle Stemmet, who has died at the age of 47 of a gunshot wound at her home in Cape Town, was one of SA’s top commercial crimes detectives and a senior member of the Hawks serious corruption investigation unit.
She was involved in a number of major investigations and had been leading an investigation into major corruption scandals at state-owned petrochemical company PetroSA.
These related to PetroSA’s acquisition of a major oil bloc in Ghana, known as the Sabre deal, and its planned acquisition of Engen garages. She was dedicated to bringing those she believed had stolen from PetroSA to book.
Four days after her death, Zumalinked lawyer George Sabelo and former PetroSA CEO Yekani Tenza were charged with fraud and/or theft.
Stemmet, who graduated with a degree in criminal justice and police science from Unisa in 1990 and became a member of the elite, world-class crime-fighting unit known as the Scorpions, which began life in 2001.
The Scorpions were independent of the SA Police Service (SAPS), which the police bitterly resented.
When the ANC closed down the Scorpions 10 years ago, Stemmet was one of a small group of investigators transferred back to the police to be part of SA’s new priority crime investigation unit, the Hawks. Unlike the Scorpions, the Hawks were under police control.
She found herself being removed from key investigations involving politicians and politically connected individuals. Other politically sensitive investigations were closed down, interfered with or deliberately stalled.
Stemmet, who took her professionalism extremely seriously, frequently said that all she wanted was to be allowed to run her investigations as she had done at the Scorpions, in a professional environment without being hampered by the interference, meddling and incompetence that she saw becoming a pervasive feature of the Hawks in the Zuma era.
This reached new levels of absurdity under Zuma appointee Gen Berning Ntlemeza, who demanded to know if an ANC politician was implicated in any Hawks investigations. Most of her investigations involved politicians and politically connected suspects.
Things seemed to be looking up for her in the post-Zuma era. She revelled in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s anticorruption drive and the investigations it spawned, in many of which she played a leading role.
As well as her successful investigative work on corruption at PetroSA, she said she was excited to sink her teeth into corruption and fraud at the Public Investment Corporation, which she began working on after the recent commission of inquiry into the PIC.
In spite of this, however, frustration about her working conditions and treatment by the SAPS seemed to cast an increasing pall of gloom over her.
She grew increasingly insecure about her future. She dreaded the prospect of being squeezed out, excluded from major investigations and assigned to small-town policing duties, running dockets in the Karoo rather than running down state-capture suspects.
“They messed us around for 10 years just to get rid of us,” she said shortly before her death, referring to the treatment of former Scorpions like herself by the police.
According to the police report she was found dead at her home in Table View, Cape Town, on the bed of a guest room in which, according to her boyfriend, she had locked herself. Two cartridges were found on the floor next to the bed. — Chris Barron