Jailed councillor wants leave to appeal
Thobile Gqola, who was jailed for fraudulently selling RDP houses, is to petition the Western Cape High Court for permission to appeal.
|||Cape Town - Former Cape Town ward councillor Thobile Gqola, who was jailed in February for six years for fraudulently selling RDP houses to indigent residents, is to petition the Western Cape High Court for permission to appeal.
This follows the dismissal on Thursday of his application for leave to appeal both his conviction on fraud and corruption charges, as well as the prison sentence, launched by defence attorney Liesl Vermaak.
He appeared in the Bellville Specialised Commercial Crime Court, before magistrate Sabrina Sonnenberg.
He was found guilty in February on three counts of fraud and six of corruption.
His case was a sequel to his promises to indigent Cape Flats residents that they would receive RDP homes if they each paid him R7 000.
He claimed, falsely, that his status as ward councillor authorised him to allocate, or influence the allocation of houses or flats to them, if they paid him.
They were to receive their RDP houses or flats a few months later.
In Thursday’s proceedings, the magistrate said the test whether to grant or dismiss Gqola’s application for leave to appeal, was whether there was a reasonable prospect of the High Court arriving at a conclusion different to hers.
An additional question was whether it was in the interests of justice to grant him permission to appeal, she said.
She said Gqola had denied the charges, and had claimed that his political opponents had influenced the victims to open a case against him.
She said he had also alleged that there was a conspiracy against him, but no evidence of any conspiracy had been placed before the court.
She said she had experienced the State witnesses as honest people and, on a totality of the evidence before the court, she had ruled the charges against him proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Sonnenberg ruled that there was no reasonable prospect of the High Court reaching a different conclusion, nor was it in the interests of justice to grant the application.
ANA