O’Sullivan accuses Mkhwanazi of running a parallel police force

Private forensic investigatorPaul O’Sullivanon Wednesday accused KwaZulu-Natal police commissionerNhlanhla Mkhwanaziof running a parallel police force and using it to get rid of rivals. Under questioning by MPs who form parliament’s ad hoc committee looking into corruption in the criminal justice system, O’Sullivan said Mkhwanazi had “repeatedly talked about informers that were supplying him with information” during his testimony last year before the same panel and the Madlanga Commission which is looking into the same issue. “Now it’s not the function of somebody that doesn’t have security clearance to manage informers and General Mkhwanazi had no security clearance, plus he wasn’t working in crime intelligence,” O’Sullivan added.

He questioned Mkhwanazi’s claims that the KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner managed informers. O’Sullivan said after Mkhwanazi’s explosive media briefing last July, in which he accused now-suspended Police Minister Senzo Mchunu of political interference in policing, an informer had approached his private investigation company, Forensic for Justice, accusing the police of using extreme violence and of extrajudicial killings. In a letter to O’Sullivan, the informer alleged that he had been subjected to police intimidation after he participated in training in KwaZulu-Natal as a police reservist.

“We didn’t know him from a bar of soap, actually we have a toll free number,” O’Sullivan told MPs. He said his forensic company had uncovered a Secret Service account used as a slush fund to channel money towards Mkhwanazi’s ‘police force’. The slush fund budget has grown to R600 million a year since the 2012/2013 financial year when the budget was R98 million.

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The budget increased 500% without any impact on crime fighting, O’Sullivan added. “We have not seen a concomitant drop in serious crime, in fact we’ve seen the opposite, we’ve seen crime increase over the 13 years,” he said, adding that many police rivalries were centred on control of the slush fund. “If the committee wants to get to the bottom of the root of all evil in the police it needs to start with the slush fund.

Many police officials want to get their hands on these taxpayer funds,” O’Sullivan said. He accused Mkhwanazi of planning the downfall of senior police officials in a meeting before the 6 July briefing attended by national police commissioner Fannie Masemola. O’Sullivan told the parliamentary committee that he had received a power point presentation where Mkhwanazi outlined his plans several days before he spoke to the media.

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