Fake engineer: A top South African railway official is sentenced to prison for forged qualifications

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

A former top official at South Africa's state-owned passenger railway company received a 15-year concurrent prison sentence on Tuesday for faking his engineering qualifications and other cases of fraud.

Daniel Mtimkulu, 49, resigned as the head of engineering at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, or PRASA, shortly before he was arrested in 2015. He was convicted of three counts of fraud and forgery in 2022 over fake university qualifications and a forged job offer from a rival company that resulted in executives at PRASA nearly doubling his salary to keep him.

Mtimkulu was sentenced to 15 years for the first count of fraud and six years in prison for each of the other two counts. A judge at the special commercial crimes court in Johannesburg ordered that the sentences be served concurrently.

As PRASA’s head of engineering, Mtimkulu was behind a deal worth more than $100 million to buy dozens of new train locomotives from Spain, which were then found to be too tall for South Africa’s rail network and couldn’t be used. The big-money contract was one of several at PRASA that have been linked with alleged bribes and kickbacks.

Investigators have said there was rampant corruption and mismanagement at some of South Africa's biggest state-owned businesses between 2009 and 2018. A report last week by a special unit that is investigating high-level corruption said that more than $7 billion may have been lost to graft at some of those state-owned companies, including PRASA.

Mtimkulu claimed to have a master's degree from a university in South Africa and a doctorate in engineering management from a university in Germany, neither of which were true. He also faked a job offer from a German company that resulted in his salary being increased from around $90,000 a year to $155,000 a year.

The judge ordered him to pay back $323,000 to PRASA, which police said were the proceeds of crime.

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AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa