There is no doubt that commercial crime is a risk faced by all organisations across all industry sectors. It is critical for organisations to implement meaningful measures to mitigate the risks occasioned by fraudulent and corrupt conduct or practices. As part of these measures, organisations need to ensure that they conduct effective forensic due diligence on their business partners and vendors.

The lack of effective forensic due diligence on business partners and vendors has often...

During the past decade, the South African public has witnessed an unprecedented enquiry into how certain key decision and policy makers had been compromised, to serve the personal financial interests of a select few role players, at the expense of the interests of an entire country.

Through the perpetration of procurement fraud and solicitation payments, even the most reputable local and multi-national private sector institutions became complicit in advancing various fraudulent and corrupt...

There can be no doubt that fraud, along with other economic crimes such as money laundering and corruption place a massive burden on both the South African economy and individual organisations.

But the cost is not only financial. Incidents of economic crime, once uncovered, can do serious harm to an organisation’s reputation and the trust its stakeholders have in it. Once lost, that reputation and trust can be tough to claw back. It is also true that ridding an organisation of fraudsters,...

Organisations face a multitude of commercial crime risks. These include fraud, theft, cybercrime, and corruption. Fraud is a significant risk that organisations face, and organisations need to be cognisant of and fully understand what this risk entails. There are numerous methods that individuals and criminal syndicates use to defraud an organisation. One of these is the misappropriation scheme known as “ghost employees”.

In 2014, a fraudster was convicted of company hijacking. This conviction for company hijacking, the first of its kind, involved a member of a syndicate that fraudulently submitted CM29 forms to the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission together with minutes and resolutions for the amendment of directorships of a global beverage company, a representative of German companies in South Africa, a production company of catalyst gauzes and customised getter systems and a property...

When one reads media headlines relating to money laundering and organized crime, it can strike fear of the unknown in any reader. It should come as no surprise that South Africa has one of the highest organised crime rates in the world, with criminal syndicates being responsible for most financial crime currently happening within the country.