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WHY SD FAILED TO PROSECUTE SALGAOCAR BOSS

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MBABANE – Extraditing Shan Rethenam from Singapore to face a litany of alleged fraud related charges amounting to E4 billion in Swaziland could have been very difficult.


Extraditing means to hand over a person accused or convicted of a crime to the jurisdiction of the foreign state in which the crime was committed.


Based on the complexities of Singaporean laws, it was going to be a mission nearly impossible to hand over Rethenam to Swaziland.
Rethenam, the former boss of Salgaocar Swaziland, is based in Singapore where the requisition for surrendering fugitives to foreign states is not easy to get – even through a court order.


Investigations into Singaporean law unearthed that Swaziland’s Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) was expected to answer critical questions or meet stringent requirements before Rethenam could be arrested in Singapore and extradited to the Kingdom of Swaziland.


The first requirement is to ascertain if the charges preferred against the person, in this case Rethenam, did not have some political connotations. For clarity, the Singapore Attorney General was expected to first determine if Rethenam did not commit an offence of a political character in Swaziland.

The ‘political character’ debacle


Legal eagles close to government told the Times SUNDAY that the difficulty emanates from Singapore’s definition of ‘political character’ as it is understood to mean an ‘offence against the law of a foreign State or declared by the Commonwealth’.

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