As J Arthur Brown told how the fraud case against him had ruined his life, people directly affected by his actions were left seething.
|||Cape Town - As former Fidentia boss J Arthur Brown told a court this week how the fraud prosecution against him had ruined his life, two beneficiaries of the Living Hands Umbrella Trust have been left seething.
The trust is a complainant in one of the fraud charges of which Brown was convicted. He faces a prescribed minimum jail sentence of 15 years unless he can convince the court that a lesser sentence is more appropriate. As he testified in mitigation in the Western Cape High Court, Notheko Joni, whose husband, Notata, died after falling ill while working on a Welkom mine, questioned how Brown “dare speak of his suffering”.
The widow, a beneficiary of the trust, said Brown’s family was “lucky to have the luxury of running to foreign countries” during tough times. “How can he speak of suffering when we have lost our husbands and our kids, are now struggling because he spent their money? It is the most painful thing to raise kids without food at home, when they want education and you can’t take them to school,” Joni said.
Since her husband’s death, Joni has had no permanent home, and struggles to educate her children. She shuttles between living in her brother’s Mandalay home and at the home of her eldest daughter in Franschhoek, where she sells pork to provide for herself and her three children. “I lost my job some time after my husband passed away and I was unable to take all my children to school. The eldest still has not completed matric. She wants to finish it and move on to university, but I can’t afford to do so. It is only now that the younger ones, 19 and 20 years old, are doing Grade 11 and 12 respectively.”
The furious woman wants Brown to feel the same pain she says he inflicted on thousands of families.
“I don’t even want to see that man. He must stay in jail forever and feel our pain. He has abused our children’s lives. You’ll find that children who were generally good children may have turned to crime because they were hungry. Luckily mine have not resorted to that,” Joni said.
A second widow, former domestic worker Nomaphelo Vabaza, said her husband, Thembisile Szani ,died in a train accident while working at a service station in Grassy Park.
“No one contacted me to say there was money due to me, and I also didn’t know to expect any. It hurts me to know only now, in this manner, that all the while I have been struggling when I shouldn’t have (been).”
Vabaza said Brown deserved more than the prescribed minimum sentence of 15 years in jail.
Pretoria News Weekend