Pretoria – The Pretoria Specialised Commercial Crimes Court has sentenced 62-year-old Stephanus Johannes van Eerden to 15 years direct imprisonment after he pleaded guilty.
North Gauteng regional spokesperson for the director of public prosecutions, Lumka Mahanjana, said the court convicted Van Eerden on 71 counts of theft.
She said Van Eerden committed the offences over a period of 13 years, from 2008 to 2021, using the same modus operandi of stealing from his numerous victims.
“He operated different investment schemes and persuaded people to invest in them as though they were legitimate businesses. Two of his investment schemes, where he stole over R8 million from 36 complainants, was Bitcoin and Med Consult Group (MCG),” said Mahanjana.
“He was arrested and released on bail in October 2017 after one of the complainants opened a case at Brooklyn police station.”
Thereafter, a number of dockets were opened for similar offences, all over South Africa, and Van Eerden was re-arrested in January. He has been in custody since.
“In the interest of justice and for the court to get a full picture of the seriousness of the crimes committed by van Eerden, the NPA took a decision to consolidate all the dockets and centralise them in one court,” said Mahanjana.
“In the testimony of one of the complainants, he told the court that he lost all his money to the investments, so much so that he cannot afford to stay in his own home and he has to rent it out in order to make a living.”
For the State, Advocate Willem van Zyl argued in court that Van Eerden was a career conman and the community needed to be protected from him. Van Zyl told the court that Van Eerden’s actions had finally caught up with him.
“He (Van Zyl) reminded the court that in 2017, when van Eerden was applying for bail, he cited extreme health problems as a mitigating factor. However, after being granted bail with a condition of not committing crime again, he committed the exact same crime four days later and continued until his arrest in 2022,” he said.
He asked the court to impose the minimum prescribed sentence of 15 years’ direct imprisonment.
In delivering the sentence, the magistrate said Van Eerden’s conduct showed his lack of ability to have true remorse, noting that he stole money because of greed, not because he had dire need.
“Van Eerden asked for a lesser sentence due to ill health, but the magistrate said that ill health cannot be used as a licence to commit crime,” said Mahanjana.
Meanwhile, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Advocate Sibongile Mzinyathi, has welcomed the sentence meted out to Van Eerden, adding that he hoped it would send a strong message that crimes of bogus investment schemes and other financial crimes wouldn’t be tolerated.
Mzinyathi added that he believes that the 15 years direct imprisonment handed down would serve as a deterrent to would-be perpetrators of similar crimes.
IOL