Alleged fraudster cooked payslips, bank statements

Lindiwe Mozola | Tuesday October 17, 2017 13:04

 

Testifying in the case, BPC accounts supervisor, Kgalalelo Mokhai said Paakanye had never been in the corporation’s employ, adding that there were abnormal features on the payslip produced as evidence even though the forgery was close to the authentic BPC payslip. Paakanye faces two counts of obtaining credit by false pretense, for allegedly using fake documents to score a P119,000 loan from Letshego on January 21, 2012 and then getting a top-up of P80,000 in February of the same year. The loans were secured from Letshego’s Francistown branch.

Mokhai testified that on March 6, 2012 the DCEC officials came with the accused‘s payslips for verification during which she assessed and found abnormalities on them.

“I have been with BPC for 16 years now and my job is to process payments for the employees, which involves processing their payslips. However, when I checked on our system, the accused’s name did not exist. “Furthermore, as I was assessing the payslip belonging to the accused, which he is alleged to have used, I found some abnormalities which showed that it was not a BPC payslip. It had a BPC logo and with just the naked eye, one would have thought it was a genuine BPC payslip,” she said.

Lesley Senwelo, who at the time was employed as First National Bank Botswana’s (FNBB) financial crime investigation manager, testified that the bank statements Paakanye produced in securing the loan, were cooked up as well. He told the court that when he was served with three bank statements belonging to the accused, which were used as proof during the loan applications, he had detected some abnormalities on close examination.

“When referring to the system-generated statement by the said account the transactions from BPC as alluded by the statement brought by the DCEC were non-existent. We further observed that on January 21, 2012, the account belonging to the accused was credited with a total amount of P119,000 and the description was Letshego 1025001. However on the statement brought by the DCEC, such transaction was non-existent.

“Furthermore, we observed that on February 13, 2012 there was another credit to the account to the value of P80,000 bearing the name Letshego 1025002 and based on that conclusion the bank statement by the DCEC were not legitimate as the entry stipulated did not tally with entries of the bank system-generated FNBB statements,” he said.

The case continues.