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Tania Broughton <\/p>\n
tania.broughton@inl.co.za<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n EIGHT years after being implicated in the \u201ccash for kidney transplant\u201d scandal, four internationally renowned medical specialists have come out fighting with a high court application to have all charges against them squashed. <\/p>\n On the eve of a trial date being set, professors John Robbs and Ariff Haffejee, and doctors Neil Christopher and Mahadev Naidoo \u2013 along with former St Augustine\u2019s Hospital transplant unit staffers Lindy Dickson and Melanie Azor \u2013 have applied for a permanent stay of prosecution. <\/p>\n Today they will appear again in Durban\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n \u201cThe doctors are not just known in Durban and in South Africa, but around the world,\u201d their attorney, Altus van Rensburg, told The Mercury yesterday. <\/p>\n \u201cThere 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,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Those left in the dock are now fighting to stay out permanently. <\/p>\n Van Rensburg said the main thrust of the \u201cmultifaceted\u201d application for a permanent stay was prejudice because of the delay in getting the matter to trial. <\/p>\n Fishing <\/p>\n \u201cIt 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\u2026 it\u2019s all \u2018they should have known\u2026 they must have known\u2026\u2019, but that is as far as it goes.\u201d <\/p>\n In addition, he said, the doctors had not benefited in any way from the illegal transplants and had only been paid their professional fees. <\/p>\n Van Rensburg said the \u201cconstitutional issue\u201d raised was the fact that these doctors had been singled out while Netcare nationally and doctors in Cape Town and Joburg \u2013 \u201cwho were clearly involved while we were not\u201d \u2013 had been let off the hook. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tania Broughton tania.broughton@inl.co.za EIGHT years after being implicated in the \u201ccash for kidney transplant\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[8275,953,2143],"class_list":{"0":"post-5900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-south-africa","7":"tag-durban","8":"tag-newspaper","9":"tag-the-mercury","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}