On February 15 2018, the day after Jacob Zuma resigned from the presidency, eight suspects stood in the dock of the Bloemfontein magistrate’s court.
The charges they faced included fraud, money-laundering and theft related to the Estina dairy project, a R250m Free State empowerment project that had been bled dry by alleged corruption. Among them was a member of the Gupta family, two erstwhile execs from the family company Oakbay, two of their business associates, and three provincial government officials.
The police said they were "seeking assistance" to bring to book three suspects "believed to be outside the republic".
Two months later, the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU) obtained an order to attach Gupta-linked assets, including cars (among them a Porsche and a Lamborghini), properties (notably the infamous Saxonwold compound) and aircraft.
That Estina case was the first criminal state-capture matter brought by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) in the post-Zuma era. It was to be the prosecuting body’s hallmark state capture case — instead, a few months later, it all fell apart.
By May 2018, the state had been forced to give back the assets it had seized. As Wayne Duvenage, CEO of the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse, wrote in Daily Maverick at the time: "All indications point to an overzealous AFU which appears to lack necessary skills and co-ordinated support" from bodies such as the Hawks and the NPA. It was, he said, a consequence of the "loss of forensic audit skills and experience within the enforcement authorities during the Zuma era".
By August, magistrate Collin Nekosi had tired of the wait: he told prosecutors to complete their investigation in three months, and chided them for "unreasonable delays" which could "substantially prejudice the accused".
Devastatingly, he said: "I’m left with the impression that there has been no momentum to the investigation as one would expect in a matter of this nature. This contributes to the delay by the state being even more reprehensible."
By late 2018, the NPA had dropped the entire case. Almost three years on, those charges have never been reinstated — despite the founding of the Investigative Directorate (ID) in 2019 and the assertion by the new unit’s head, Hermione Cronje, that the dairy project was a "priority".
Towards the end of 2019, Cronje said a criminal case connected to the dairy was in its "final stages" of development. "The investigation explains almost to the cent where the money went and where it ended up. Charges are being formulated," she said at the time.
Things went quiet again, despite several witnesses testifying about the dairy racket at the commission of inquiry into state capture.
In June this year, one and a half years after Cronje’s pronouncement, police finally arrested four suspects (a fifth was later added), but only in connection with a 2011 feasibility study for the Estina project.
That case is not unimportant: the Free State government, then run by Ace Magashule, allegedly paid a company owned by Gupta associate Iqbal Sharma R25m to produce that report. But it’s far less ambitious than the failed 2018 case.
One source with insight into the ID’s work tells the FM the initial case fell apart partly because of limited access to reliable financial records.
"It is clearer now what happened with Estina," says the source, pointing to financial analysis of Bank of Baroda records.
But the collapsed case also raises questions of competence and capacity.
For a start, the state lacked the evidence to tie the suspects to the financial flows: the bank statements it relied on didn’t actually show any payments to the Guptas, as high court judge Fouche Jordaan noted at the time.
As the FM previously reported, the state seemed to rely on transactions conducted through the Bank of Baroda’s Nedbank pool account — an account serving hundreds of clients — to make its case. This was a misunderstanding that Gupta advocate Mike Hellens called "reckless incompetence".
Perhaps it was a rush to make the most of the political moment that ultimately sank it — the NPA hurriedly put together a case, prematurely, in the wake of Zuma’s resignation. Mindful of that, the ID now seems to be taking a pinhole approach: collating formidable proof, establishing an unbroken chain of evidence (specifically on financial flows linked directly to Gupta-controlled accounts) and on a fairly narrow point.
Hopefully, the R25m feasibility report case — set down for trial in September — will be the start of the slow road to accountability for the R250m Estina-sized hole in the fiscus. Even if it is a decade after that study was done.
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