Update

MOSSEL BAY NEWS - Two former Mossel Bay municipal employees who pleaded guilty on more than 60 fraud-related charges of up to R123 000 were sentenced to direct imprisonment in the Mossel Bay Regional Court today.

The accused, both in their 30s, Megan Abdul and Siphokazi Majolla, have been found guilty of changing the status of burials from a standard burial to an indigent burial or a cremation and other irregularities from July 2016 to April 2018.

The modus operandi was to cancel a specific transaction following a reservation of a grave, without the funeral undertaker being aware of it.

Abdul and Majolla would tell the administration staff at the municipality that people paid too much for a burial and would then pocket the difference in cash for themselves.

In court it was said that Abdul and Majolla acted individually but at all times with a common purpose which they discussed together and they followed the same modus operandi throughout.

During sentencing the magistrate called fraud within municipalities a cancer in South African society.

The magistrate said that both the accused were employed and received a monthly salary. She also said that they took money from people in Mossel Bay who probably did not have much.

Abdul and Majolla were sentenced to five years' direct imprisonment of which two years were suspended for five years.

Both of them seemed visibly shocked by the sentence.

Their attorneys indicated that they had received instructions to appeal against the conviction.

Corné Pretorius represented the state as prosecutor.

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