Defensor Security Company and two directors found guilty of R384m fraud
The court also found Claudius Gerald Peterson, Gert Renier van Rooyen and their company guilty of contravening the Public Finance Management Act and the Private Security Industry Regulation Act (PSIRA).
Peterson, Van Rooyen and Defensor were charged together with Steven Jonkers, the former head of the department of health in the Northern Cape, in 2020. Jonkers was acquitted of all charges.
Hawks spokesperson Lt-Col Tebogo Thebe said Jonkers, now deputy director-general in another provincial department, allegedly irregularly awarded a tender to Defensor Electronic Security Systems for security services to the department between August and October 2017.
The tender's value was initially R224m but later escalated to more than R384m.
'The directors submitted fraudulent documents to gain an unfair advantage over others to be awarded the tender,' Thebe said.
The case was reported to the Hawks' serious corruption investigators in December 2017 and arrests were made in 2020.
Northern Cape Hawks head Maj-Gen Stephen Mabuela welcome the convictions.
'The wheels of justice may have turned slowly in this matter, but this conviction offers us hope. My appreciation goes to both the investigating and prosecutorial teams for their hard work,' Mabuela said.
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He was arrested over two… — Newzroom Afrika (@Newzroom405) August 6, 2025 According to various reports on the court proceedings, the State had alleged that Molefe had ties to the illicit drug trade. Molefe's bail application is expected to resume on Friday, 15 August. Back to the R200-million Port Shepstone theft of 2021. Jaguar clue and (in)secure storage According to various sources, that stolen cocaine consignment was the one found in Isipingo on 22 June 2021. Traffickers may have got wind of pending police action and temporarily abandoned this stash destined for Gauteng. A previous SAPS statement about the Isipingo interception said: 'Twenty-six canvas bags with TikTok and Jaguar brands were found with bricks of cocaine.' And Hawks head at the time, Godfrey Lebeya, had warned: 'We are closing in on the drug cartels.' While it remains unclear who owned the seized cocaine, Daily Maverick established that high-ranking Sinaloa Cartel member Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, who was reportedly sentenced to 40 years in jail in the US in 2022, used aliases including 'Jaguar'. A US indictment against him and other Sinaloa Cartel members said he had 'exclusively used the logo of a 'jaguar' on cocaine bundles to designate his ownership'. In any event, when the R200-million cocaine consignment was stolen in 2021 a few months after the Isipingo bust, the Hawks issued limited details. A statement had said the burglary occurred at their Port Shepstone offices over the weekend of 5 and 8 November 2021. 'The suspects gained entry into the building by forcing open the windows. One of the safes in the office, which were used to store exhibits, was tampered with,' the statement said. 'The suspects stole 541kg of cocaine drugs… and ransacked the office where safes were kept.' All this suggests that for nearly five months an international cartel's cocaine worth more than R200-million had been kept in Hawks offices that were not adequately secured, to the point that the windows could be forced open. This brings up other highly concerning questions about what else is being stored in police premises and whether those buildings have proper security measures in place. Forensic labs According to government information, confiscated drugs aside from cannabis should be sent to an SAPS Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) for testing and storage. A police minister response to a 2016 Parliamentary question about seized drugs said that except for cannabis, consignments were sent to forensic science laboratories 'for analysis, secure storage and destruction, whilst awaiting finalisation of the case and issuing of a relevant disposal order by the National Prosecuting Authority'. Another response to a Parliamentary question, dated February this year, stated: 'Drugs, including illegal substances (excluding cannabis), are stored separately and all illegal drugs, regardless of whether a case docket has been registered, must be forwarded to the… FSL for analysis and eventual destruction.' The SAPS, according to yet another response to a June 2025 Parliamentary question, has four laboratories in the country — in Gauteng, the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. It therefore appears that the R200-million worth of cocaine stolen from the Hawks offices in Port Shepstone in 2021 should have been stored at the KwaZulu-Natal Forensic Science Laboratory, which is in Amanzimtoti. (This FSL experienced flooding damage in 2022.) Why the police did not secure the cocaine there now remains one of many publicly unanswered questions around the theft. The Crime Intelligence cases Adding to that scandal is an incident sandwiched between the R200m Isipingo cocaine confiscation of June 2021 and the theft of the cocaine in Port Shepstone a few months later. In July 2021 a consignment of cocaine, also worth about R200-million, was intercepted in Johannesburg. Four suspects were arrested. According to their lawyer, they were Warrant Officer Marumo Mogana, a Crime Intelligence officer; Warrant Officer Steve Pakula, an Organised Crime Unit member; Samuel Mashaba who was acting deputy director of Gauteng's community safety department; and businessman Tumelo Nku. The case against them went on to be withdrawn. Earlier this year, though, the National Prosecuting Authority told Daily Maverick it had instructed further investigations be carried out. A decision on the case would be made after that. This saga exposed divisions within the country's historically controversial Crime Intelligence unit. Daily Maverick previously reported that Major-General Feroz Khan, the head of counterintelligence and security at Crime Intelligence, was accused of defeating the ends of justice and bringing the SAPS into disrepute over his presence at this cocaine interception. But Khan, via court processes, countered that the Crime Intelligence head at the time, Dumisani Khumalo, had used the cocaine interception to try to get rid of him because of his investigations into the abuse of secret funds, with possible links to Khumalo. According to the police, the cocaine at the centre of that controversy had come from Brazil, arrived in KwaZulu-Natal and was transported to Gauteng. This matches some of Mkhwanazi's recent accusations about an alleged drug cartel and the routes it used. As for Khumalo, Daily Maverick reported that earlier this year the SAPS had warned Parliament he was being targeted via misinformation because he was cleaning up the Crime Intelligence unit. Khumalo and six colleagues went on to be arrested in June on corruption-related charges, which they denied. Mkhwanazi, during his pivotal press conference the following month, implied that they had been arrested with the deliberate aim of destroying Crime Intelligence. Cartels and Commission of Inquiry President Cyril Ramaphosa recently announced a Commission of Inquiry into Mkhwanazi's allegations. Its terms of reference stated that it would investigate 'whether criminal syndicates, including but not limited to drug cartels, have infiltrated or exert undue influence over' various law enforcing bodies. This included the SAPS, metro law enforcement in Gauteng, the National Prosecuting Authority and judiciary. Daily Maverick has reported extensively on the different cartels that operate via South Africa. Brazil's notorious Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), or First Capital Command, is among them. And there are, of course, suspicions relating to the Sinaloa Cartel, once headed by Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán Loera who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the US in 2019. A previous US court document relating to his pretrial detention had explained: 'A cornerstone of his strategy was the corruption of officials at every level of local, municipal, state, national and foreign government, who were paid cash bribes.' Suspected corruption in different government and state structures plus alleged cartel activity is at the core of what the Commission of Inquiry into Mkhwanazi's accusations is set to focus on. The 2021 Port Shepstone R200-million cocaine theft out of Hawks offices may therefore be among the incidents that the commission covers — or, in terms of exposing finer details, uncovers. DM
