A senior official has been implicated in a matric exam cheating scandal by a Durban North man who has pleaded guilty to buying examination papers.
|||Durban -
A senior official has been implicated in a matric exam cheating scandal by a Durban North man who has pleaded guilty to buying examination papers, allegedly for the purpose of re-selling them.
In his plea in the Durban Regional Court on Thursday, Mohit Premsunker Maharaj, 46, admitted he had paid his co-accused, Nqaba Felokwakhe Magubane, R5 400 in exchange for his silence regarding any information related to the leaked exam papers.
Magubane, employed as an examination administrator at the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education’s Truro House offices in Durban since 1997, has pleaded not guilty to corruption charges and is expected to appear in court again next week.
He is on R2 000 bail.
Maharaj was given a three-year, wholly suspended sentence on condition he was not convicted of a crime relating to corruption, theft or any offence involving dishonesty.
Investigations were sparked by an invigilator at Durban High School (DHS), who found a pupil with a suspicious piece of paper during last year’s matric exams.
The invigilator alerted the principal and the pupil was searched and allegedly found with the leaked economics paper.
The boy said he and a friend had bought it for R5 000 from a matric pupil – Maharaj’s son - at the school.
DHS alerted the department the same afternoon.
Maharaj and his girlfriend, who also works at Truro House, were taken in for questioning. However, the girlfriend was never charged. She is expected to be a State witness.
At the time the department told the Daily News that the papers found were copies of the reserve papers kept on standby in the event of a leak.
It was alleged Magubane had copied the papers and sold them to Maharaj’s girlfriend. At the time his son claimed Maharaj had handed him the papers and told him to hand them to another pupil for R5 000.
Among the papers Maharaj allegedly obtained from Magubane were maths paper 2, life sciences, geography, economics and Afrikaans.
In his plea statement Maharaj said the money was exchanged along the Esplanade between November 3 and 19 last year, shortly before both men were arrested by Berea detectives.
Department spokesman, Muzi Mahlambi, said yesterday that Magubane had been on suspension on full pay since November.
He said Maharaj’s girlfriend had been suspended pending an internal investigation.
Mahlambi said: “Nobody from the outside can access the papers, only the exam administrators and, in this case, someone who has worked at the department for years.”
He added: “This is a criminal act and is taken very seriously. Even if you’re found with an empty answer booklet, it is a crime.”
The results of the three DHS pupils implicated in the exam leak remain blocked pending the outcome of the investigation, the department said.
rizwana.umar@inl.co.za
Daily News
