The KwaZulu-Natal provincial government Director-General has suffered another legal blow after the Durban High Court dismissed her application to have her trial separated from the rest in the Mhlathuze Water Board corruption case.
The controversial Dr Nonhlanhla Mkhize wanted to have her case speeded up, citing prejudice if tried later with the other 16 accused including Durban based lawyer, Ralph Sithembelo Mhlanga.
Judge John Olsen called Mkhize’s application “premature” and dismissed it.
“In the circumstances, separating the trial of the applicant from that of the principal accused will place upon the State a duty of leading all of the evidence on the principal charges twice over, and upon the public purse the burden of financing that enterprise twice over,” Judge Olsen said in his ruling.
“It is for good reason a matter of legal policy that a course which involves more than one court of first instance hearing and deciding the same issue should be avoided if at all possible.
“For these reasons, if I am wrong in holding that the application cannot be considered now, I would have dismissed the application for separation of trials.”.
The judge also said the State has incurred unnecessary expenses through the application brought by Mkhize.
“I do not think that allowing such an application to survive sends the correct message. The state has been put to unnecessary expense, and judicial resources have been expended unnecessarily.
“The papers in this application would in any event not be fit for purpose by the time the trial judge might be asked to consider a separation of trials,” the judge added.
Combined, all the 17 suspects in the Mhlathuze corruption face 280 counts of corruption, fraud, theft, forgery, money laundering, defeating or obstructing the course of justice, contraventions of the Public Finance Management Act, and intimidation.
Almost all of the cases arise from or are connected to a series of payments made by the Mhlathuze Water Board to a firm of attorneys (including Mhlanga’s law firm) between about August 2019 and July 2021.
The sum of the payments is approximately R37 million.
The State has indicated that Mkhize is currently facing an investigation for alleged robbery and extortion. That was revealed in court papers in August when the State defended the application to have the trials separated.
