Well-known Eastern Cape football club boss Rodney “Mash” Mashaya, who has been languishing in jail since March for a theft he committed in 2009, is out of prison after he was granted bail by the Grahamstown High Court.
Mashaya, who owns ABC Motsepe provincial league outfit FC Buffalo, was released on bail of R10000 on May 31 pending a high court review of the Komani Magistrate’s Court decision in April to send him to jail for five years.
He could not be reached for comment yesterday.
However, his lawyer Henry van Breda yesterday confirmed his client was on bail and out of jail.
Van Breda yesterday said his client had paid back all the money he admitted to stealing in 2016.
Mashaya spent more than two months in prison after the Komani court refused to grant him bail on April 25.
He was arrested in late March after he failed to honour the conditions set out in the suspended sentence handed down in 2016.
Van Breda said they were now waiting for a high court date to argue for a review of Mashaya’s sentence. “After the regional court in [Komani] refused to grant him bail or leave to appeal his sentence we took the matter on appeal in the high court.”
Mashaya and his business associate Rodgers Klaas were found guilty in 2016 by Komani regional magistrate Onika van Papendorp for stealing R485000 from Ikhala TVET College in Komani in 2009 – money they spent after depositing it in the account of Mashaya’s company, Zezethu Engineers.
They pleaded guilty and were each sentenced to five years in jail.
The sentence was suspended on condition they start paying the money back “within six months from the date of the sentencing”.
Mashaya was also sentenced to three years of house arrest and ordered by the court to do community service at the municipal nursery in Nahoon.
Klaas is understood to have paid back the amount agreed, but when Mashaya failed to pay his amount for over a year, he was summoned back to court in March by the National Prosecuting Authority.
This is where his 2016 five-year suspended sentence was triggered and he went to jail.
According to the charge sheet, Zezethu Engineers, was appointed by Ikhala as a principal agent to manage a building contract worth R1.6-million. They were paid R446360 for their services.
The company was later paid R1.2-million for the job – money Zezethu was meant to pay over to the construction company responsible for the building works.
However, Mashaya’s company only transferred R714274 and illegally pocketed R485 725.
The court found that Mashaya and Klaas had “misappropriated” this money via a substantial number of cash withdrawals from the call account. — asandan@dispatch.co.za..