The criminal trial of former police Crime Intelligence head Richard Mdluli resumes on Monday, 16 November, in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria. The reopening lands while the unit he once led faces separate scrutiny at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry. The convergence of the two processes places both the National Prosecuting Authority and the South African Police Service under renewed pressure to show that a case first registered in 2011 can still deliver an accountable outcome.
Proceedings had been halted earlier this week after Mdluli fell ill. He is accused alongside Colonel Heine Barnard, formerly the unit’s supply chain manager, and Major General Solomon “Solly” Lazarus, its former chief financial officer. All three pleaded not guilty at the start of the trial.
The charges concern the alleged looting of the SAPS Crime Intelligence Secret Service Account between 2008 and 2012. The State alleges that covert funds earmarked for national security were diverted to private purposes. These included holidays to China and Singapore, the personal use and conversion of a witness protection house in Boksburg, and the leasing of Mdluli’s private townhouse at Gordon Villas in Gordon’s Bay to the state as a safe house, with the monthly rental used to pay his bond.
Investigating Directorate Against Corruption spokesperson Henry Mamothame confirmed that Monday’s session will move directly into a trial-within-a-trial. The defence intends to challenge the validity of search warrants issued during the original investigation, seeking to have portions of the State’s evidence declared inadmissible. Before this week’s adjournment, prosecutors had completed their examination in chief of the first witness, a retired investigator who served with both the Hawks (DPCI) and IDAC. Defence counsel were partway through cross-examination when the case was paused.
The resumption closes, for now, a chapter of institutional failure that has shadowed the case for well over a decade. The chronology of delays reads as a study in how accountability mechanisms can be stalled. In December 2011, after representations from Mdluli, then-prosecutor Advocate Lawrance Mrwebi controversially withdrew the charges. Both the Gauteng High Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal subsequently found that withdrawal illegal and irrational. Those rulings compelled the National Prosecuting Authority to reinstate the case in April 2015.
Further obstruction followed. From 2015 to 2020 the matter was struck off the roll because key documents had been classified as “top secret”. Only in July 2019 did then-National Police Commissioner Khehla Sitole declassify the files, allowing the trial to return to court in August 2020. Between 2021 and 2024, Mdluli fought to have the police fund his legal defence, prompting prosecutors to file repeated court applications to end the stalling. In April 2024 the court ordered the trial to proceed regardless of the outcome of the outstanding review matter. The State Attorney, acting for SAPS, gave an undertaking that Mdluli would fund his own defence, with reimbursement of reasonable legal expenses if his review application ultimately succeeded.
Meanwhile, the current trial sits against a longer record of litigation stretching back to Mdluli’s arrest in 2011. He was convicted in 2019 and sentenced in 2020 to five years’ imprisonment for the 1998 kidnapping, intimidation and assault of Oupa Ramogibe, a man who had married Mdluli’s former lover, Tshidi Buthelezi. He was released on parole in July 2022 after serving just over a third of the sentence and remains out on bail in the corruption matter.
For oversight bodies and prosecutors, the coming week will test whether a case that survived withdrawn charges, adverse appellate rulings, secrecy classifications and funding disputes can now be carried to conclusion on its merits. With Crime Intelligence already under examination at the Madlanga Commission, the High Court’s handling of the trial-within-a-trial will be watched closely as a measure of how the state’s own institutions account for the conduct of those who once ran them.