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The High Court has acquitted a Harare businesswoman of fraud in a case in which she was accused of swindling her former business partner of $22 000 in a botched deal.
Ms Patience Chivasa was last year sentenced to six months in prison or a $600 fine by the Harare magistrates’ court on allegations of defrauding Dharmesh Nagar, a South Africa-based businessman of Indian descent.
She was also slapped with an eight-month prison sentence, wholly suspended on condition that she reimbursed the $22 000 to Nagar, who claimed to have released the money through his company known as Media Revolutions.
Nagar claimed to have given Ms Chivasa $20 000 as consultation fees for her to facilitate several business transactions and $2 000 for the printing of zanu-pf Women’s League t-shirts ahead of the party’s 2014 conference.
Ms Chivasa, through her lawyer Mr Admire Rubaya of Rubaya and Chatambudza Legal Practitioners, subsequently lodged a High Court appeal against both conviction and sentence.
High Court sitting as an appeals court last week quashed both conviction and sentence.
“The appeal be and is hereby allowed. The conviction is set aside and sentence quashed,” ruled Justice Charles Hungwe, who heard the appeal with Justice Edith Mushore.
In her grounds of appeal, Ms Chivasa argued that the State had relied on one witness and that the lower court applied the wrong standard of proof in convicting her. It was further argued that the State’s case was weak as there was no documentary evidence that she received the money while Nagar also failed to reveal the purpose for the release of the funds and the collateral used to secure the money.
Meanwhile, Ms Chivasa has reported the Zimbabwean-born Nagar to the police for allegedly insulting her over the phone and tampering with her e-mail account to present false evidence which led to her arrest and conviction. — HR.
Online Reporter