Moroadi Cholota, who was the PA to former Free State Premier Ace Magashule, at the Bloemfontein High Court on 23 April 2025.
Mlungisi Louw/Gallo Images/Volksblad
- The Free State High Court in Bloemfontein has upheld Moroadi Cholota’s special plea to the graft charges she faces over the asbestos removal tender.
- Former premier Ace Magashule’s one-time assistant, Cholota, was accused in a fraud and corruption case stemming from a failed R255-million project to eradicate asbestos roofing in low-income homes in the province.
- She raised a special plea, challenging her extradition from the United States and, as a result, the court’s jurisdiction to try her.
Ace Magashule’s former assistant, Moroadi Cholota, has successfully scuppered her prosecution on graft charges related to the asbestos removal tender.
On Tuesday, the Free State High Court in Bloemfontein upheld Cholota’s special plea to the charges.
Cholota had challenged the lawfulness of her extradition from the United States last year and, as a result, the court’s jurisdiction to try her.
In its ruling, the court relied on a judgment the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) handed down last year.
In it, the court essentially found that the power to request an extradition was vested in the justice minister – not the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), despite the latter having made all extradition requests for the last three decades.
Cholota was accused alongside 17 others, including Magashule, in a fraud and corruption case stemming from a failed R255-million project to eradicate asbestos roofing in low-income homes in the Free State.
The work was awarded to a joint venture involving controversial businessman Edwin Sodi’s Blackhead Consulting, allegedly irregularly. Magashule—who was the premier at the time—and other government officials allegedly received massive kickbacks in exchange for their involvement.
Cholota was previously positioned as a State witness. However, after Hawks officers interviewed her in the US in 2021 while she was studying there, they decided to charge her as an accused.
On the State’s version, she became uncooperative during the interview and would not give names when she was asked on whose instructions she had acted when she sent email requests to contractors for “donations”.
Cholota, meanwhile, maintained in her special plea that she was being punished for not implicating Magashule and that the State had “lied/misrepresented to US authorities that there was reasonable and probable cause” for the charges against her.
She also accused the State of having “lied/misrepresented to US authorities that [she] was a fugitive from justice” and “was refusing to come back to the country and face the charges, and needed to be extradited” as well as “that [she] was a flight risk with connections in Kenya” and part of a syndicate.
In the end, though, Judge Phillip Loubser said on Tuesday that it was not necessary to delve into the grounds laid out in the special plea against the backdrop of the SCA’s ruling. That ruling was handed down in May last year on the back of efforts to extradite US-based artist Johnathan Schultz on charges related to the theft and sale of unwrought precious metal.
He stressed that the SCA’s ruling was delivered two months before Cholota’s extradition was ordered.
“The prosecuting authority was a party to the litigation in the Schultz case and must have known of the decision of the SCA. They had two months to engage the minister to request the extradition of Ms Cholota, but they never did,” he said.
He added that the SCA’s judgment was instructive.
“Moreover, in our law system, the High Court and other lower courts are bound to follow the decisions of the SCA. The court, therefore, has to follow the decision of the SCA in the Schultz matter,” Loubser said.
Although the State had argued that the Schultz judgment should not be considered because it had not been raised in the special plea initially, Loubser said: “If something was done unlawfully in the extradition process, that wrong can never be cured by a failure to plead same in the special plea. After all, it was at least pleaded the extradition was unlawful.”
The State further argued that the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) was involved in Cholota’s extradition, but, as Loubser said, that argument was also made in the Schultz case and was rejected.
He ultimately declared Cholota’s extradition “to have been done unlawfully for want of a valid and lawful request for her extradition by the South African executive power”.
He found the court did not have jurisdiction to try her.
When Loubser told her she was “free to go,” Cholota burst into tears.
The case resumes on Wednesday when the other accused are expected in the dock after they were excused from the special plea proceedings.
