FRAUD OFFICERS INVESTIGATE CROOKES EXPATRIATE

mbongeni@times.co.sz

MBABANE – The net is closing on!
Officers from Royal Eswatini Police Services, Fraud and Commercial Crimes Unit, on Thursday rounded up the expatriate who has been implicated on allegations of forged qualifications and work permit concerns at Crookes Brothers Plantation. This company is found in Big Bend and deals with agri-businesses.

Two different Curriculum Vitas (CVs) were submitted to the immigration department by the expatriate during the application of a work permit last year. Following contradicting information submitted documents and further complaint forwarded to the Training, Localisation and Labour Migration Board (TLLMB), government decided to launch investigations to verify the authenticity of the expatriate’s qualifications and address the complaint by workers.\

Student

As reported by this publication, in one of the submitted CVs, the expatriate mentioned that he was a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where he was studying MSc in Business Administration.
However, the university, through corresponding emails with government, disputed knowledge of the expatriate, arguing that he was not registered in their system.

In the second CV in possession of government and has been seen by the Times, the expatriate has not listed his master’s degree qualification.
He, however, mentioned that he had a Diploma in Sugar cane Agriculture which he obtained from Hippo Value Estates.
Investigations have since found that Hippo Value Estates was not a tertiary institution but just a company.

Information sourced from the company’s website is that Hippo Valley Estates is a subsidiary of Tongaat Hulett Limited and primarily involved in growing and milling sugar cane in Zimbabwe. The company’s duties involve planting, maintaining and harvesting sugar cane crops and haulage to the sugar mill.
The company is an extensive enterprise and has other interests in sugar packaging, game hunting, fishing, and livestock and citrus farming.
Chiredzi Township (Private) Limited provides services for water treatment.

In another suspicious qualification, the expatriate mentioned that his certificate was a Bachelor of Science Degree in Agriculture Management yet in the confirmation letter from the institution it states the qualification he has is actually a Bachelor of Science Degree in Agricultural Management.
In fact, the course itself is called Agricultural Management, not Agriculture Management.

Other contradicting information is that he took 15 years studying for a five-year course at the Zimbabwe Open University.
According to documents seen by the Times, the 51-year-old expatriate, who is from Zimbabwe, listed six qualifications that he claimed he obtained from universities including Harare Polytechnic, Zimbabwe Institute of Management, South African Sugarcane Research Institute,
Hippo Value Estates and Zimbabwe Open University.

The ‘visitation’ by the law enforcers from the fraud unit comes at a time when government had argued that there was an attempt to dribble or circumvent its on-going investigation regarding the expatriate’s academic papers.

Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Social Security gave this comment last month after it transpired that on May 29, 2020, the company lodged two new Form Js in its files at the Registrar of Companies wherein it listed the expatriate as the new director of Crookes Brothers Plantation and Bar J limited.
The company also confirmed to the Times that the expatriate was appointed as a director in February.
An impeccable source at the company said the officers from the fraud department arrived around 4pm on Thursday.
The source alleged that they engaged in a meeting with the expatriate.

“They met with him behind closed doors,” the source said.
Superintendent Phindile Vilakati, Police Information Communications Officer, confirmed that officers from the fraud unit paid ‘a visit’ to the company.
“Our investigations are still on-going and we cannot reveal any information to the public for now,” she said.

Meanwhile, Lisa Pretorius, Executive Human Resource Manager at Crookes, asked not to comment on the visitation by police.
Last month, the TLLMB stated that as long as the company had not stated whether the expatriate was a shareholder, his appointment as a director would still require him to apply for a work permit. A board member told the Times that for a person to apply for a work permit, that person needed to be outside the country.

Efforts

“In fact, we are viewing the enlisting of the expatriate to be undermining the efforts done by the committee on the issuance of work permits. Whosoever is advising the company to try and dodge the system has not done his/her calculations well,” the member said.

Meanwhile, a confidential report regarding the expatriate’s work permit dated September 8, 2019, states that documents submitted before the board were incomplete.

“We made countless enquiries on the progress of the application and we were told it was still in process.
“It was called in by the immigration officer for clarity in a few areas including adverts for the position and also reasons for not doing so as the expatriate was now occupying another post which was not what he applied for in his last permit,” the report states.

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