Roadworthy bribe pair escape jail time
A pit assistant and a cashier at a vehicle testing station have escaped jail time for accepting bribes to pass defective vehicles as roadworthy.
|||Cape Town - A pit assistant at a vehicle testing station in Cape Town has been sentenced to 24 months house arrest, which includes cleaning and maintenance at the Mitchell’s Plain police station, for fraud and corruption.
The pit assistant was also handed down a six-year suspended prison sentence.
A cashier at the same station got two five-year suspended prison sentences, on charges of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.
The pit assistant, Clarence Collins, 64, and Roslyn Solomons, 29, the cashier, appeared in the Specialised Commercial Crime Court in Bellville, before magistrate Sabrina Sonnenberg, on Monday.
The case took the form of plea bargain proceedings, negotiated with prosecutor Gertrude Magopeni by attorney Sherry Medgley, for Collins, and advocate Denzil Langeveldt, for Solomons.
The hearing resulted from a police undercover operation (trap), on November 5, 2014, in which Collins accepted a R4 400 bribe to fraudulently declare three defective vehicles as free of defects, for roadworthy purposes, without first testing them.
Later the same month, he accepted a second bribe, this time for R650, to similarly declare a defective vehicle as free of defects, for roadworthy purposes, without first testing it.
The charge sheet describes how agents involved in the trap first took the three defective vehicles, a Mazda Drifter 4×4 bakkie, a Toyota Condor and a Toyota Hilux, to a testing centre in Durbanville, where a traffic officer declared both vehicles defective and unroadworthy.
The same three vehicles were then taken to a testing centre on the Cape Flats, where Collins and Solomons worked.
Solomons’ role was to capture the three vehicles on the eNaTis system, for the issue of roadworthy certificates in respect of all three vehicles – well aware that they had not been duly tested.
The charge sheet also cites vehicle testing examiners Razien Jacobs and Andre Sissing, of the same testing centre, but who were not involved in the plea bargain proceedings.
They face charges of fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, corruption, conspiracy to commit corruption and contravening the Road traffic Act.
They are to appear again on March 14.
African News Agency
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