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The Herald, February 23, 1979
ASSERTIONS by Mrs Mary Magdalene Bronkhorst that she had committed 27 counts of fraud to meet the demands of a blackmailer were rejected by the prosecution when her trial continued at the Salisbury Regional Court yesterday.
Mrs Bronkhorst has admitted that on 27 occasions, she visited banks in Salisbury and Bulawayo and, by means of false statements, obtained foreign currency in respect of travel allowances to which she was not entitled. She obtained foreign currency to the value of $22 459.
She told the court at a previous hearing she needed the money to pay a man who had fathered her child before her first marriage and who had been blackmailing her.
Detective Inspector Alan Mills, of the CID Fraud Squad, said that when he interrogated Mrs Bronkhorst after her arrest, she had told him that she was a member of the Israeli secret service, that she was looking for a Nazi war criminal and that she was also associated with the CIA.
At first, he had been inclined to accept her story about being blackmailed, he said, but after a time he had come to doubt it.
Nowhere could they find evidence that the man she named had ever entered the country, and he doubted whether he existed.
Mrs Bronkhorst’s attorney, Mr S. M. Taylor, of Gill, Goldlonton and Gerrans, said if the blackmail story was true, it put his client in a better light since she had not acquired the money out of personal greed.
The prosecutor, Mr J.T. Lynch, of the Attorney General’s Department, told the magistrate, Mr John Redgment, that the story was a fabrication.
Mrs Bronkhorst had willingly become the agent of a group of men who, by falsifying her passports, had enabled her to obtain foreign currency, he said.
This currency they had changed for Rhodesian dollars and Mrs Bronkhorst had made a considerable sum of money.
Most of it remained unaccounted for and to cover herself, she had invented the blackmailer. Her story belonged to the category of fiction, he said. The magistrate will pass sentence on March 2.
LESSONS FOR TODAY
Crime does not pay and sooner or later, the perpetrators will have to account for their actions.
Fraud is a serious crime and there is no excuse that is good enough to justify one’s decision to commit such a crime.
The demand for foreign currency will always be there and people will always want to come up with devious ways of manipulating the system to acquire it. In the current scenario there are people who have been abusing the US$50 facility availed by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe through bureau de changes, resulting in the central bank redefining the beneficiaries of the facilities.
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