CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — A former top executive at South Africa’s state passenger transport company was sentenced to 15 years in prison Tuesday for falsifying his engineering degrees and other fraud.
Daniel Mtimkulu, 49, resigned as head of engineering at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, or PRASA, shortly before his arrest in 2015. He was convicted in 2022 of three counts of fraud and forgery over false university qualifications and a forged offer from a rival company, leading PRASA executives to nearly double his salary to retain 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 chief engineering officer, Mtimkulu was behind a deal worth more than $100 million to buy dozens of new train locomotives from Spain, which subsequently proved too expensive for South Africa’s rail network and could not be used. The big-money contract was one of many at PRASA that have been linked to alleged bribery and kickbacks.
Investigators have said that between 2009 and 2018 there was widespread corruption and mismanagement at some of South Africa’s largest state-owned companies. A report last week from a special unit investigating high-level corruption said that more than 7 billion dollars may have been lost through corruption at a number of 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, but both were untrue. He also faked a job offer from a German company, which increased his salary from about $90,000 a year to $155,000 a year.
The judge ordered him to pay back $323,000 to PRASA, which police said was proceeds of crime.
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