Durban man, who left scene in Mercedes, pleads guilty to theft for July 2021 looting incident at Woolworths store
|Published
Durban – More than a year after the incident, a Durban man has pleaded guilty to theft and contravention of the National Road Traffic Regulation in the Durban Regional Court on Wednesday for looting a basket of items from a Woolworths store in Durban during the 2021 July unrest.
National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) regional spokesperson Natasha Ramkisson-Kara, said Mbuso Moloi, 32, stole household items from a Woolworths store in the Davenport area during the looting.
Regarding the traffic violation, she said Moloi had contravened the road traffic regulations by not having the requisite licence plates for the vehicle he was driving at the time of commission of the offence,” she said.
Ramkisson-Kara said that in his plea, Moloi explained that on the day of the incident, he and his friend were driving around with the intention of purchasing some items.
“When they drove into Davenport, he noticed that people were emerging from a Woolworths store. At the spur of the moment, he stopped his vehicle and went into that store. He picked up a plastic shopping basket and filled it with a few items. He then left the store without paying and placed the basket in his vehicle before driving off,” she said.
She said Moloi’s explanation for the car licence plates was that he had failed to replace the “dealer plates” with the relevant/correct licence plates allocated to the vehicle.
Last November, ‘The Mercury’ reported that Moloi’s Mercedes-Benz C300 Coupé was forfeited by the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU) of the NPA in KwaZulu-Natal.
“The car, which was forfeited on the basis that it is an instrumentality of the offences, was valued at approximately R500 000 at the time of the offence,” Ramkisson-Kara said at the time of the report.
“The AFU welcomes this development as it reinforces the NPA’s strategy to focus not only on prosecutions, but also on taking away assets where they are proved to be instrumental to the commission of crime,” said Ramkisson-Kara.
The NPA also noted that that under Chapter 6 of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act, such recoveries were not reliant on convictions at the end of a trial and could be an effective deterrent against crime.
“Since the vehicle was under a purchase agreement from a bank, it was handed over to the bank,” said Ramkisson-Kara.
The matter was remanded to May 31, 2023 for pre-sentencing reports.
The NPA said the court extended Moloi’s bail in the interim.
