By 
Foreign currency dealer Michael Amushelelo and his business partner Gregory Cloete have made a first pretrial appearance in the Windhoek High Court, where they are due to be prosecuted on a total of 365 criminal charges.
Amushelelo (30) and Cloete (33) had their first pretrial hearing in the High Court before judge Christie Liebenberg yesterday. Their case was postponed to 18 November, when a second pretrial hearing is due to take place.
The indictment in which the prosecution sets out its charges against Amushelelo, Cloete and four close corporations, a company and a trust controlled by Amushelelo, contains 365 charges.
Amushelelo is facing all of the charges, while Cloete is charged with 360 of the counts.
The two men are accused of having operated a Ponzi scheme, in which money was solicited from investors who were lured by promises of high returns on their investments, and later investors’ money was used to pay back earlier ones’ money.
Amushelelo and Cloete were first charged after they had been arrested in October 2019.
They are jointly charged with 348 counts of fraud, alternatively theft by false pretences, single charges of money laundering, racketeering, conducting an unauthorised banking business and conducting a Ponzi scheme, which is a contravention of the Banking Institutions Act, four counts of fraudulent tax evasion, and four charges of failing to pay tax.
Amushelelo is further individually charged with counts of fraud (tax evasion) and failing to pay tax, and an additional charge of fraud.
Together with some of his close corporations, a company and a trust controlled by him, he is also charged with additional counts of fraud (tax evasion) and failing to pay tax.
The state is alleging that, starting from September 2018 and until October 2019, Amushelelo and Cloete ran an investment scam in which they promised people high returns on money invested with them and claimed they would use investors’ funds to trade on foreign currency platforms through a non-existent company called Global Growth Investment Namibia.
Investors allegedly paid a total amount of about N$14,7 million to them in 348 individual transactions.
Instead of using the money which they solicited to carry out foreign currency trading, Amushelelo and Cloete used it to sustain their Ponzi scheme by making payments to earlier investors with the money they received from later investors, “thereby literally recycling investments”, the prosecution is alleging.
Investors were allegedly attracted with promises that an investment of N$5 000 would earn 50% interest after two to four months.
An investment of N$2 500 for a period of eight months was supposed to earn investors a payout of N$12 654,25 after eight months.
According to the state, Amushelelo and Cloete had no independent income reflected in the bank accounts through which investors’ money was channelled.
The two men are also alleged to have bought several cars – including two Mercedes-Benzes, two BMWs, an Audi and a Land Rover – and used money received from investors to pay for the insurance of the vehicles.
They used money received from investors to pay for the rent of properties leased by them as well, it is charged.
In the last fraud charge faced by Amushelelo alone, the state is alleging that he sold an Audi Q3, which did not belong to him, to one of the investors in his and Cloete’s scheme for N$130 000 in December last year.
Since the buyer had invested N$30 000 with him previously, Amushelelo allegedly negotiated that she would pay N$100 000 into the bank account of one of his businesses.
Amushelelo and Cloete remain free on bail of N$35 000 each.
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