Tag Yachts bookkeeper admits to stealing R3m

A bookkeeper has admitted to stealing R3m from a doomed St Francis Bay yacht-building company.

Bridgette Wait, 35, told the Port Elizabeth Commercial Crimes Court on Monday how she had substituted the banking details of the creditors of Tag Yachts SA (Pty) Ltd with her own.

Between August 2014 and August 2017, she managed to pocket more than R3m, which was deposited into her bank accounts.

Then, less than a year later, she similarly defrauded her new employer, Bull Clothing in Jeffrey’s Bay, this time out of nearly R300,000.

Magistrate Hannes Claassen found Wait guilty on 220 counts of theft. She will be sentenced in May.

Defence attorney Anlen Murray said because her client had a minor child, she would call a psychologist to testify about the effects on the youngster of Wait being sentenced to a possible jail term.

Tag Yachts has since closed shop and its erstwhile directors, Timothy van der Steene and Ryan Osborne, are under investigation over the loss of millions of rand in clients’ funds

A string of investors were left penniless and without their promised luxury catamarans when the business folded.

“I was employed at Tag Yachts in August 2014 in an administrative position,” Wait said in her guilty plea read out by Murray yesterday.

“One of my duties was to capture payments to creditors of the company on the Standard Bank online facility of Tag SA.

“I prepared and presented a list of payments, with the invoices, to one of the directors of the company [Van der Steene or Osborne].

“They would check the amounts on the invoices and compare it with the amounts on the payment list, relying on the information as prepared by myself, and then release payment,” Wait said.

While Tag held a Standard Bank account, Wait had several bank accounts registered in her name.

She then fraudulently substituted the banking details of Tag’s creditors and suppliers with her own.

As a result, more than R3m was deposited into Wait’s account.

Tag was placed in business rescue on August 23 2017.

In April 2018, Wait started a job at Bull Clothing, where she was employed as personal assistant to the director.

A month later, she once again started to steal.

“On May 28 2018, I substituted three of the suppliers of the company’s bank accounts with my own, resulting in amounts totalling R294,468 being deposited into my bank accounts,” Wait told the court.

State advocate Lise Keech said she had no previous convictions.

Her bail was extended to May 7, when arguments in mitigation and aggravation of sentence will be heard.