South Africa: Man held for R20m government pension scam

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South Africa: Man held

for R20m government pension scam

By Gill Gifford

Independent Online, May 17, 2003

South Africa - An administrator from the Government Employees' Pension Fund (GEPF) has been arrested for an alleged pension fraud scam believed to involve more than R20-million.

The 31-year-old man was arrested when he arrived for work at the pension scheme's Pretoria offices in Arcadia early on Friday. Sweating profusely, he was led away by the police as his colleagues stared in shock.

Senior Superintendent Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said the man would appear in the Pretoria Commercial Crimes court soon.

His arrest is the result of six months of quiet investigations initiated by National Treasury's GEPF, conducted in collaboration with the police's Serious Economic Offences Unit, and in the presence of Finance Minister Trevor Manuel.

Strange Things Have Been Happening in the Pension Fund

"The GEPF is a defined benefit fund in that every contributor knows what he or she will get out. It's not affected by the kind of rise and fall in expected payments we have seen discussed in the media recently," Manuel said.

"Over a period we became aware that strange things have been happening in the pension fund. So we started investigating."

Treasury spokesperson Logan Wort said the fraud was believed to have been happening on a national level, and investigators were still in the process of "following paper trails and tracing victims". He was unable to say how many people had been defrauded.

According to Wort, two suspects were believed to have been feeding confidential information to outside companies. These small businesses, armed with the intended victims' payout information, would then contact the person and offer to get their money paid out more quickly.

Playing on the victim's lack of awareness of their rights, the company would take a cut of between 20 percent and 30 percent for their "services".

Martins-Engelbrecht said investigations would continue and more arrests were expected to follow. She said the full extent of the fraud had still to be calculated.