Gold Krugerrand theft accused Kevin Kaschula on Thursday told the East London regional court he did not recall which of his former bosses had told him to open a safety deposit box in his own name so he could store 80 coins belonging to multimillionaire EV Krull.
For more than 20 years, Kaschula kept Krull’s 80 coins in his personal box in a vault in Nedbank’s East London branch where he used to work.
As a senior manager, he was instrumental in purchasing the coins for Krull, and for storing them in the vault.
This week, Kaschula told the court he had forgotten throughout the 1990s to hand over the coins to their owner, right up until 2015, when it transpired that more than 400 coins that Krull had stored in the vault for safekeeping, were missing.
Kaschula, the bank’s former foreign exchange manager, stands accused of stealing 480 gold coins, valued at more than R7.2m, from one of Krull’s two safety boxes between 1994 and 2015.
He denies any wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty to the theft charges.
When asked on Thursday by senior prosecuting advocate Wayne Japhta who had instructed him to register a box in his own name to keep Krull’s coins, Kaschula responded that he could not remember.
Kaschula told regional magistrate Ignatius Kitching that subscriptions for the safety box in question were initially debited from one of Krull’s accounts at the bank, but were later paid by him, despite him having no knowledge how it was deducted from his account as he never authorised this.
He told the court such subscriptions were deducted from his account for years, but he only noticed them in 2015.
Japhta said it was concerning that no paper trail had been kept for the deposits of Krull’s coins in Kaschula’s box.
In his 2017 testimony, Krull told the court that he had purchased more than 300 gold coins before the 1994 democratic dispensation, which he later placed in the bank vault.
After entering into an agreement with Nedbank, he purchased a further 400 coins through the bank by the end of 1995, which they also kept in their vault.
In total he believed he had close to 800 coins in the bank, but when he checked in 2015, only 320 were recovered, while an additional 80 were discovered in the box belonging to Kaschula. He was then informed the missing coins would be investigated.
Kaschula told the court he never saw any other coins belonging to Krull except the 400 the bank had purchased on his behalf.
“I cannot comment on what he had before, only about what the bank purchased for him.”
His bail was extended until the trial resumes in January...