R107.5 million meant to heal coal mines went to contractors. Gupta-linked firms are now guilty

R107.5 million.

That is the money two Mpumalanga coal mines were meant to keep for cleaning up after themselves. On Friday 9 October, the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg found that it was used to pay mining contractors and other third parties.

Five accused linked to the Gupta family's mining business are now convicted of fraud and money laundering.

What did the court find on 9 October?

TimesLIVE reports that the court convicted five accused. Two are people and three are companies.

• Ronica Ragavan, a director of Koornfontein Mines and Tegeta when the offences happened
• Pushpaveni Govender, a director of Optimum Coal Mine and, from 26 April 2016, a trustee of both rehabilitation trusts
• Optimum Coal Mine
• Koornfontein Mines
• Tegeta Exploration and Resources

The charges were fraud and money laundering. The money came from trusts that held the clean-up funds for the Optimum and Koornfontein mines. The court found it was used to pay contractors and other third parties instead of repairing the damage mining caused.

The Guptas themselves are not among the five convicted in this report. The label "Gupta-linked" describes the firms, not the people in the dock.

What is a mine rehabilitation trust?

A mine takes coal out of the ground and leaves a mess behind. Pits, polluted water and scarred land are all part of it.

Rehabilitation trusts hold money for that clean-up. The idea is simple. The company puts the cash aside while it earns, so that when the mine closes, the bill is already paid.

National Director of Public Prosecutions Andy Mothibi put it plainly after the verdict. He said these trusts exist so that the communities around a mine are not left to carry the cost. The acting head of the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption, Ntuthuzelo Vanara, also welcomed the convictions.

Photo: Hein waschefort / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Where did the R107.5 million come from?

The money came out of two trusts in 2016. Nearly all of it came from one.

93%

Koornfontein trust	R100.00	93%
Optimum trust	R7.50	7%
Moved in 2016	R107.50	100%

Source: TimesLIVE, 9 October 2026. Amounts in rand millions.

That is R100 million from the Koornfontein Rehabilitation Trust and R7.5 million from the Optimum Mine Rehabilitation Trust. R100 million is about 93% of the total.

How did the trusts end up under Gupta-linked control?

The Investigating Directorate said in 2022 that Tegeta took control of both trusts in 2015. A year later came the transfers.

Govender became a trustee of both trusts on 26 April 2016, according to TimesLIVE. That same year the R107.5 million left the trust accounts.

This was not new to the public. In September 2017, TimesLIVE and BusinessLIVE reported on a court action meant to stop the Guptas grabbing mine rehabilitation funds. It took nine more years to reach a verdict.

How long did the case take? The full timeline

Here is the whole story in one place, from the first move on the trusts to the verdict. Dates come from TimesLIVE, SAnews and the National Prosecuting Authority.

Seen like this, the story is long. The verdict came more than ten years after the money moved.

Why did the trial take so long?

Some of it was ordinary court delay. In February 2024, News24 reported that the trial was held up because one accused had not paid his lawyers. The start was pushed to November.

Then came the long middle, while the state put its case. Only in July 2025 did the court throw out the accused's request to be let off before they had to answer.

By then all the accused had pleaded not guilty to every charge. That is why a verdict only arrived in October 2026.

What about the other person charged?

When the arrests were made in May 2022, a former senior state official was arrested too. Joel Raphela was a deputy director-general at the then Department of Mineral Resources.

TimesLIVE's report on the 9 October verdict lists five convicted accused, and he is not among them. We did not find a report of what happened to him in the case, so we are not guessing.

The 2025 discharge ruling also shows how large the case was. The accused faced 11 charges in all, including fraud, money laundering, forgery, perjury and breaking mining and environmental rules.

What happens on 1 December?

The case was postponed to 1 December 2026 for sentencing. That is when the court will say what the five convicted accused will face.

TimesLIVE does not give the exact counts each accused was convicted on, and it does not say what sentence the state will ask for. We will not guess at that either.

Mothibi said the NPA stays committed to fighting corruption. That is a line you have heard before. We went through what happened to the biggest corruption cases and who went to jail, and the pattern is slow courts and long gaps between money moving and anyone being named.

There is a smaller version of that story at city level. When people ask where their municipal money goes, the answer is rarely as clear as a trust account.

Photo: Linton Brothers Photographic Material and Stock Importers, 61 Market Square, Sydney, photographer / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Who pays when the clean-up money is gone?

That is what the trusts were built to prevent. Their whole point is that communities do not pay for the damage.

TimesLIVE does not say what state the Optimum and Koornfontein sites are in today, or whether the R107.5 million has been put back. Those are the two questions that matter to people who live near the mines.

R107.5 million. Ten years. One date left on the calendar, and it is 1 December.