The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) welcomes the sentencing of the former Chairman of Venda Building Society (VBS) bank, who masterminded the looting of R1.9 billion that precipitated the collapse of the bank. Matodzi was sentenced after pleading guilty to 33 counts of corruption including theft, fraud, money laundering and a pattern of racketeering activities.
The 495 years that is compressed into 15 years due to sentences running concurrently. For a person who masterminded the looting, the effective imprisonment should have been more than 25 years. Despite our wish for a longer effective sentence, this is one of the unprecedented cases in which people in the corporate world are imprisoned. This is not usual. Managers in Tongaat, Steinhoff, etc are still to be imprisoned.
SAFTU calls for the prosecution and sentencing of other culprits who were involved in the looting of the savings and deposits of poor pensioners. The greedy aspirant bourgeois collapsed a progressive banking initiative for the poor and went on a wide-scale looting spree with workers’ life savings. The ambitions of the 30 000 depositors who built the bank were unfortunately thwarted by greed.
The federation calls for increased efforts to combat corruption both in the private and public sectors. It is only through direct imprisonment that the economic and political elite can be disincentivised, and eventually defeated.
SAFTU continues to stand with workers and old age pensioners who fell victim to greed, theft and corruption that took place at VBS.
