Portia Sizani asks high court to force ‘biased’ magistrate to recuse himself
Portia Sizani‚ wife of SA’s ambassador to Germany‚ Stone Sizani‚ resorted to the High Court in Grahamstown on Thursday, in a bid to force a magistrate to recuse himself from her fraud and money laundering trial. Sizani’s counsel‚ advocate Johan Wessels‚ argued that there was much to substantiate Sizani’s subjective perception that Mputumi Mpofu, the magistrate presiding in her R1.2m fraud trial‚ was biased against her. Wessels said it was largely because of the way in which Mpofu always ruled against her during her trial that she had developed her perception of bias. According to Wessels, Mpofu had not been open to argument or persuasion even when direct evidence of indisputable fact had been placed before him. The former early childhood development district co-ordinator stands accused of defrauding the provincial education department by creating "ghost" teachers and pocketing their salaries between 2009 and 2010. Mpofu has already found Sizani not guilty on five of the 15 counts of...
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