JOHANNESBURG – Former Transnet chief financial officer Anoj Singh is testifying at the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture in a special evening session.
Researcher Paul Edward Holden from Shadow World Investigations in London took the stand at 10am.
The commission previously heard from Holden that the fugitive and controversial Gupta family laundered R287 million received for the Estina dairy farm project in a complex manner to make it appear as if they had tripled the amount.
The Free State Estina dairy farm project was meant to empower emerging farmers in the area.
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Holden told the commission that the Gupta family began laundering money through Estina more than a year before the dairy project started.
Holden said that the Free State provincial government made the first payment to Estina in June 2012 but the movement of money through the company began as early as May 2011.
”Estina was effectively being used as a front for money laundering by the Gupta enterprise a full year before the initiation of the dairy project,” Holden said previously.
In his evidence, Holden showed the commission how R287m paid by the Free State provincial government into the Guptas’ Estina account was circulated through various Gupta-controlled companies and bank accounts and paid into the dairy project to make it appear there was a total of R880m moving through the account during the life of the project from 2012 to 2016.
He said the increase, which is about R600m, indicated that the R287m paid by the Free State government was washed three times in a circle to produce the R880m amount.
”What was happening was a very complex system of money laundering in which Free State government funds were paid out of Estina and through a very sophisticated loop eventually returned back into the Estina account which made it look like Estina was receiving deposits from other sources but it was effectively deposits derived from the Free State government,” he said.
Holden told the commission that they managed to trace R35m, which indicates that a mere 3.89% of all the deposits received or interest accrued did not derive from Free State government funds.