It has been a long journey, but justice has now been served.
Those were the words of Nelson Mandela Bay public prosecutor Wilhelm de Villiers on Monday, when disgraced Port Elizabeth lawyer and convicted fraudster Michael Randell handed himself in to finally begin a four-year sentence for his role in a fraud committed nearly 20 years ago.
Randell, 65, handed himself in to the clerk of the court in Port Elizabeth and was expected to spend his first night in St Albans Prison on Monday night.
This follows Randell’s failure in a final bid to avoid a jail term, when the Commercial Crimes Court released a Constitutional Court judgment dismissing Randell ’s appeal against his R2.5m fraud conviction involving Greenwood Primary school in the city.
Randell and his co-accused – former Greenwood principal Patrick Shelver and school governing body chair Michel Lascot, who died in 2007 – defrauded the Park Drive school between 1999 and 2006.
Randell, who had been out on a bail of R15,000 since being convicted on April 21 2016, had pocketed R800,000 of the proceeds of the fraud.
The formerly well-respected litigator was handed a six-year jail sentence, with two of those years having being suspended.
A tenacious De Villiers, who had earlier been described as having been “married to the case” since the start of the trial, agreed in a light-hearted comment on Monday that he was now “divorced” and could put the case behind him.
“It has been a long journey, but justice has now been served,” De Villiers said.
Shelver had pleaded guilty to his part in the fraud in January 2013 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, suspended for five years on condition that he pay back the money within the five years.
Shelver and Randell – who was the vice-chair of the school’s governing body at the time of the fraud – were arrested in November 2009 after they were accused of pocketing money from the sale of a school property.