Entrepreneurial dream lands man in dock
A Western Cape man’s dream of starting a business blast-cleaning used wine barrels has landed him in court on multiple fraud charges.
|||Cape Town - A man’s dream of starting a business specialising in the blast-cleaning of used wine barrels, has landed him in a Cape Town court on multiple fraud charges.
Hein Spies, 40, of Wellington, appeared in the Specialised Commercial Crime Court, in Bellville, on Monday, before magistrate Sabrina Sonnenberg, who warned him to appear again on March 23.
The charge sheet describes how he approached the company Ice Jet Blasting, in Paarl, with the idea – namely, instead of using chemicals to clean used wine barrels, wine makers could use dry ice to blast-clean the barrels.
The owner of Ice Jet Blasting, Bruce Jamieson, liked the idea, and had a mobile high-pressure cleaning machine specially built for this purpose, with Spies running the new business.
An account was opened with Boland Dry Ice, so that dry ice would be readily available to Spies, as and when required.
All orders for the blast-cleaning of barrels had to be sent to Jamieson’s wife, Wendy, who would capture them electronically and invoice the customers.
Because wine making is seasonal, the new venture did not “take off” as expected, and Jamieson and Spies decided to purchase used wine barrels, blast-clean them and re-sell to wine makers.
This was not lucrative either – or so Jamieson thought, until he received a complaint from the company Kovacs, alleging that Spies’s refurbishment of the barrels was inadequate.
Kovacs was in fact in the process of taking legal action against Spies and Ice Jet Blasting, Jamieson learned.
According to the charge sheet, Jamieson had been unaware of the business with Kovacs, and there was no record of any invoices pertaining to it.
Jamieson’s investigation revealed that Kovacs had in fact been invoiced, by Spies himself, but that the invoices contained Spies’s bank details instead of Ice Jet Blasting’s.
Confronted about it, Spies asked for and was given a “second chance”.
According to the charge sheet, Jamieson expanded the blasting business to epoxy flooring, and Spies was sent on a course to study the process.
However, Spies then did only one epoxy job, but kept requesting from Jamieson extra petty cash, without the documentation needed to reconcile the financial ledgers.
The prosecutor, senior State advocate Denzyl Combrink, alleges that Jamieson checked the files on Spies’s laptop, and discovered that Spies had not only issued fraudulent invoices to Kovacs, but to numerous other companies also, and that each invoice contained Spies’s bank details instead of Ice Jet Blasting’s.
It is also alleged that Spies also quoted for flooring jobs on Ice Jet Blasting’s invoices, and received commission, without Jamieson’s knowledge.
Spies now faces 74 counts of fraud, involving R101 529.
African News Agency
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