The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has been accused of abusing the criminal justice system after a failed attempt to secure conviction against its former complainant-cum-accused person, Bernard Mahara Mutanga, who was acquitted on a $6 million land fraud charge on Tuesday.
Charles Laiton
Regional magistrate Adonia Masawi lambasted the NPA for prosecuting the land baron over a case where initially he was the complainant against three convicted Harare men, who allegedly fraudulently seized his land and booted him out of the directorship of his company.
“This is a ploy to purely criminalise a civil matter which should not have seen the doorstep of this criminal court, more so that there is no fraudulent misrepresentation ever done by the accused,” Masawi said in his judgement.
Masawi said the State had initially accepted that medical doctor Christopher Harry Bruce MacGuire, his brother a lawyer, Phillip Michael MacGuire, and chartered accountant Thomas Antony Wisdom had fraudulently removed Mutanga and his wife Tsitsi from the directorship of their firm, Twairob Investment, leading to their arrest and conviction.
However, for a reason best known to the State, it later accepted a report by the convicts that there were complainants against Mutanga although their appeal was still pending at the High Court.
“Because of a set of certain reasons, it (the State) rules accused (Mutanga) to be the owner of Twairob, then for some other reason best known to the current prosecutor after three years and even before the conviction of the complainants has been overturned, the State appears before the same criminal court seeking a conviction of the same company by alleging that the prosecutors were after all lying, the convicts are in fact the real owners,” Masawi said.
“This clearly is more astounding than a medieval circus. This court should refuse to be abused, misused and overused by a prosecuting authority which does not know the rigours of the legal process. It is very surprising that the matter even survived the vetting stage in this form.”
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He added: “The current counsel for the State (Michael Reza) even sought to allege to the court that the NPA was prepared to consent to the setting-aside of the complainants’ conviction, but he came back after an adjournment face down indicating that the Office of the PG (Prosecutor-General) responsible for the appeals had not given him his wishful consent.”
The magistrate said the complainants remained convicts consequent to the State’s prosecution, thus they had no right to appear before him as complainants against Mutanga.
“This is clearly an abuse of the criminal justice system meant to try and nullify the replacement of the deed which the accused has,” Masawi said.
