Tania Broughton
tania.broughton@inl.co.za
EIGHT years after being implicated in the “cash for kidney transplant” scandal, four internationally renowned medical specialists have come out fighting with a high court application to have all charges against them squashed.
On the eve of a trial date being set, professors John Robbs and Ariff Haffejee, and doctors Neil Christopher and Mahadev Naidoo – along with former St Augustine’s Hospital transplant unit staffers Lindy Dickson and Melanie Azor – have applied for a permanent stay of prosecution.
Today they will appear again in Durban’s Commercial Crime Court on charges that they assisted in about 90 illegal transplant operations performed at the hospital. It is expected that the matter will have to be adjourned to give the State time to formulate its reply.
“The doctors are not just known in Durban and in South Africa, but around the world,” their attorney, Altus van Rensburg, told The Mercury yesterday.
“There are estimates that this trial will take between a year and two years (to be finalised). How can they be removed from their practices for this length of time to answer to a flimsy case? That is just not fair,” he said.
The matter has been ongoing since 2003, when police arrested an Israeli citizen as he was discharged from hospital after undergoing a transplant operation with a kidney he bought from a Brazilian man for R270 000.
Following arrests and guilty pleas by various members of the alleged syndicate, the surgeons and Netcare staff were arrested in 2005, but charges were dropped the following year because the State was not ready to proceed to trial.
They were then re-arrested in 2008. Subsequently Netcare KZN pleaded guilty and paid a R4-million fine and one of the doctors, Dr Jeff Kallmeyer, who was living in Canada, entered into a plea bargain with the State, paying a R150 000 admission-of-guilt fine.
Those left in the dock are now fighting to stay out permanently.
Van Rensburg said the main thrust of the “multifaceted” application for a permanent stay was prejudice because of the delay in getting the matter to trial.
Fishing
“It has been an eight-year fishing expedition in which the State tried to find evidence, but they have found nothing. I have looked at the docket; the charges are all based on conjecture… it’s all ‘they should have known… they must have known…’, but that is as far as it goes.”
In addition, he said, the doctors had not benefited in any way from the illegal transplants and had only been paid their professional fees.
Van Rensburg said the “constitutional issue” raised was the fact that these doctors had been singled out while Netcare nationally and doctors in Cape Town and Joburg – “who were clearly involved while we were not” – had been let off the hook.
The State will indicate at court this morning how long it will need to reply to the allegations, and the matter will then be set down for hearing before a judge.
