MOSSEL BAY NEWS - Mossel Bay residents expressed their shock over what they described as a "harsh sentence", following a sentence of direct imprisonment handed down to two former Mossel Bay municipal employees on Friday, 6 May, in the Mossel Bay Regional Court.

Following the sentence, social media users expressed their concern and asked why the accused, both mothers, could not have been handed down a sentence excluding imprisonment.

The accused pleaded guilty on more than 60 fraud-related charges of up to R123 000. 

Both in their 30s, Megan Abdul and Siphokazi Majolla, were 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.

Sentencing

During sentencing, Magistrate Sylvia Mandla said both the accused had been unemployed since they were caught out. They both, however, have husbands who are the breadwinners in the families and who can take care of the children.

Mandla said Abdul and Majolla's children were still young while they started and continued to commit the crime, and said that their motherhood and the wellbeing of their families did not stop them from stealing money.

Mandla referred to other similar court cases in which employees committed fraud within municipalities, specifically to a previous case in Oudtshoorn, in which the accused was also sentenced to jail after he was found guilty of about five fraud-related charges.

Mandla said that in this case, Majolla and Abdul pleaded guilty to more than 60 fraud-related charges.

She called fraud within South African municipalities a cancer in society. Mandla also said that Majolla and Abdul stole money from poor people who didn't have much money, even though both of them earned a monthly salary.

Abdul and Majolla were sentenced to five years' direct imprisonment, of which two years were suspended for five years. Their attorneys indicated that they had received instructions to appeal against the conviction. Corné Pretorius represented the state as the prosecutor.

'We bring you the latest Mossel Bay, Garden Route news'