I was working in partnership with Lucas
Presiding: Commissioner Kevin Rodgers Part-heard · one witness of four attended
Four citizens were summoned to the Courthouse this evening. One came.
The Registrar called Smith Phillip. No answer. Smiths Matlala. No answer. Lender Makhedama. No answer. No application to be excused was made by any of them, and all three were active in this province while the Commission sat.
What followed was an hour with a single witness — and it turned out to be the most damaging hour this inquiry has had.
The seizure is confirmed. So is the fact that nobody wrote it down.
Jaden Kobos, Deputy Chief of the South African Police Service, was sworn and asked first about another man's evidence.
At the previous sitting, the Chief of Police, Marcos Cassidy, told this Commission that he and Kobos had removed 7,000,400 diamonds from a citizen during a policing action in the last week of July. He said the diamonds had been stashed in a vehicle. He said the citizen was called to a secluded place, agreed, and did not resist.
Kobos confirmed it. All of it.
He named the citizen: Lucas Kaneki. He confirmed the timing. He confirmed the vehicle. He told the Commission the decision to take the diamonds and to keep them was Cassidy's.
Then the Commissioner asked why no record exists.
There is no case file. There is no docket entry. There is nothing in any provincial register. Seven million diamonds were removed from a citizen by the two most senior police officers in this province, and on the province's own records the event never happened.
Kobos's answer was that screenshots were usually taken and sent to a group. Pressed on why nothing appears in any official record, he said: "I don't know." He was asked again. "I don't know."
The Commissioner put it to him directly — that as Deputy Chief, this was the standard he had set.
"Yes. True."
On the question of why the diamonds went into Cassidy's private warehouse in Idlewood rather than into the custody of the state, Kobos said that was Cassidy's decision, and that Cassidy kept them to himself.
The Commissioner then made the difficulty plain: an unrecorded seizure into a private store is indistinguishable, on paper, from a man simply taking seven million diamonds — and the only thing separating those two readings is a witness's word.
Asked whether he stood by his word, Kobos said he did.
And then the second half of his evidence
The Commission turned to Kobos's own account, and the ground moved.
This inquiry has told the province twice that this matter began on 28 July. Three payments, one night, two names, one man. That was said from the bench at the close of the last sitting.
The ledger records a payment into Jaden Kobos's account on 27 July — R10,612,666, by the identical mechanism, the day before. Three further sales the same day, paid normally because the provincial vault happened to have the money: R15,681,600, R12,988,800 and R11,761,200. A second irregular payment of R3,150,000 followed on the 28th.
Asked how the money reached him, Kobos gave an answer this Commission had not anticipated.
I was working as a partnership with Lucas. That time he actually dropped them and gave me — as partners. I just sell them.
He confirmed the commodity was diamonds. He confirmed there was a second sale the following day and that nothing about it was different. Asked why the amounts were split, he offered: "I think it's about the marketing, how it works."
The Commission has searched his warehouse, his inventory and his residence. He holds no diamonds. He holds no mining commodity of any kind — not one sellable unit of anything. Asked whether what he sold was gone or had never been there, he said: "I don't remember."
The significance is this. On 27 July, Lucas Kaneki was not selling. He was distributing. He had enough duplicated diamonds to hand a working supply to a serving Deputy Chief of Police a full day before he made a single irregular sale of his own.
Every time this Commission has looked further back, it has found something older. It can no longer say with confidence that it has found the beginning.
The officer who investigated himself
On 2 August, R27,000,000 was confiscated from Jaden Kobos's account and returned to the provincial vault. The officer who ordered the confiscation was Kobos.
Asked why, he told the Commission that once he established what the mechanism was, he did not want to hold the proceeds of it, and so he took the money off himself.
Asked why he then told nobody — why this Commission is hearing it for the first time tonight, more than a fortnight later — he said:
Because I was still investigating the method that Lucas Kaneki was doing.
So the Commission had, in one chair, the man who received the diamonds from Lucas Kaneki as a partner, and the man who was investigating Lucas Kaneki. The same man. In the same fortnight. With no record made of either role.
His account received substantially more than R27,000,000. Asked why that figure and not all of it, Kobos said he had bought himself a car, and could not remember the amount.
Asked where the rest went, he said he had shared it with family, and named Mia Makhedama and Jessica Makhedama.
That surname has now appeared four times in this inquiry, across four different citizens, in four unconnected contexts. The Commission has drawn no conclusion from it. It has, however, noticed.
What the Commission corrected
Commissioner Rodgers opened by setting down two standing rules — that these proceedings are in character at all times, and that a witness who cannot be heard cannot be examined, his evidence untaken and his questions left unanswered on the record.
He then withdrew a finding of his own. At the previous sitting he had recorded, twice, that no evidence connected Marcos Cassidy to any other person named in this inquiry — and had repeated it in his closing, after Cassidy had himself told the Commission he had taken the diamonds off the man at the centre of it. That finding was withdrawn, with the Commission noting that Cassidy had volunteered the connection freely when he could have stayed silent.
The Commission also confirmed that Lucas Kaneki has complied with the direction issued at the close of the last sitting, and has delivered his list of recipients.
Every name on that list will be summoned.
One. The Commission has corrected its own findings for a second consecutive sitting.
Two. This matter did not begin on 28 July. The ledger records an irregular payment on 27 July, to a serving officer of this province, by the same mechanism. Each time this Commission has looked further back, it has found something older.
Three. Both officers who took part in the seizure of 7,000,400 diamonds now agree, on oath, that no record of it was made anywhere in this province. Whatever else this inquiry finds, it will have something to say about that.
Four. Two separate sums of R100,000,000 left Lucas Kaneki on 31 July — one at lunchtime, disguised as the sale of a vehicle, and one at night, passed through two hands within twenty-five minutes and fragmented across twelve recipients. This was not one careless evening. It was two methods running the same day.
Five. Three summoned parties did not appear, and all three were active in the province while the Commission sat. They are re-summoned. The Commission draws no conclusion from a single absence — but it has now recorded one, and a second will be a different matter.
No witness heard tonight is discharged.
Three of tonight's four witnesses were online while the hearing ran and did not join the channel. That's the honest position, and it's why the sitting ran as a single examination.
If you're summoned and you genuinely can't make it, message the organisers before the sitting — an excused absence is a normal thing and it costs you nothing. An unexplained one goes on the record, and from here the Commission will start treating a second no-show differently from a first.
The public gallery remains open to everyone. You do not need to be summoned, involved, or in-game to listen. Sessions run in the Commission voice channel at 18:00 daily.
If you record anything worth airing — in the chamber or out of it — submit it to the Gazette media submissions channel. Aired footage is paid for as usual.
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