Publications
- A former police employee has been handed an eight-year sentence for fraud.
- The man was found to have used the petrol card of a scrapped police vehicle to pay for fuel for his vehicle.
- Fumanekile Gaba was also found guilty of defrauding SAPS out of R110 000.
The Mthatha Specialised Commercial Crimes Court has sentenced a former Eastern Cape police fleet manager to eight years' imprisonment for fraud.
Fumanekile Gaba, 43, was found to have defrauded the South African Police Service (SAPS) of R110 000, National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) spokesperson Luxolo Tyali said.
"Gaba was employed as the fleet manager at the SAPS Local Criminal Record Centre when he committed the crime between September 2019 and August 2020. He used a fleet fuel card belonging to a scrapped vehicle to put fuel into his vehicle, and vehicles belonging to cash-paying motorists at the Qunu Service Centre," said Tyali.
Internal auditors established that the card was still in use even though the vehicle to which it was allocated had been scrapped.
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He was arrested after investigations revealed that Gaba had been colluding with a petrol attendant at the filling station, said Tyali.
Tyali said:
According to Tyali, the court did not view Gaba's change of plea as "a sign of remorse".
"It (the court) found that Gaba occupied a position of trust, which he betrayed, and as a SAPS employee, he was supposed to uphold the highest form of honesty, but he chose to commit the offence out of greed," said Tyali.
