‘Stolen’ money used to pay tithes, court hears

Durban — A pastor’s wife has been arrested and charged with fraud after she allegedly used her senior position in a company to enrich herself and pay her tithes.

Lingasperi Madurai, 55, appeared in the Pinetown Magistrate's Court on Tuesday and was granted bail of R50 000.

It’s alleged that Madurai, who was employed by P & A Fabricators in Pinetown for 27 years, fleeced the company out of close to R2 million by diverting money into several personal bank accounts and disguising it as creditor payments.

Madurai quit her job at the beginning of April when she learnt that both a criminal and an internal investigation were under way. She was arrested on Monday.

This week the court was handed a sworn statement by the company’s human resources administrator, Nosihle Cele, in which she explained that previously she was under the “direct control and management” of Madurai.

In the statement, Cele said she had been authorised by the company’s managing director to assist with the internal investigation into Madurai’s irregular and fraudulent activities and had been given access to all information and documentation relating to such investigations.

Cele said she established in March 2024 that Madurai was inflating her overtime hours and submitting claims to the company for payment. She said this was unusual because Madurai’s salary exceeded the threshold at which an employee could claim for extra hours, as set out in the terms of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act.

“It was also established that the employer did not authorise or consent to Ms Madurai being paid for these extra hours. Ms Madurai claimed these extra hours as if it was part (of) her monthly salary package and loaded it on the system for payment.

“As such, the employer would not have realised her misrepresentation.”

In the affidavit, Cele said during this time Madurai was the head of the company’s financial department and had to oversee all its accounting practices. She also had the authority to load payments onto the company’s online banking platform so the payments could be made. It was Cele who alerted her seniors to the financial irregularities.

Attorney Manoj Haripersad, who has a watching brief for the company, told the Sunday Tribune that so far the company had only gone through statements from 2022 to March 2024 and had already established that Madurai had taken an amount in excess of R1.8m.

Haripersaid said: “So in going through their records, they’ve established that these transactions had continued from a period much longer than that. So I think they estimate the value to be much larger than, or substantially more, than what she’s being charged for at the moment.

“From the transactions, it would appear that there may be other arrests as well in terms of persons that were paid and the way the monies were moved around into her account.

“So basically she would upload payments onto the accounting system, citing creditors as if payments were due to them, and hence the misrepresentation to the employer who released the payments due to the trust relationship, only to find out later that these were not payments to creditors, but payments into one of her many bank accounts that she had.”

The information he gave the Sunday Tribune was evidence that had already been led by the investigating officer during Madurai’s bail application.

It also emerged that apart from paying her tithes with the money she allegedly diverted to her accounts, the accused also made two large donations to her pastor in the company’s name. The pastor has since come forward to make a statement, saying that she believed the payments were donations for books she had written.

The investigations continue.

Sunday Tribune