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Hearing record

Day 159

Witness: Suleiman Carrim

Evidence led by Advocate Adila Hassim SC

The commission does something it has never done: it resolves to lay criminal charges against a witness. Suleiman Carrim, too unwell to testify since March but well enough for Woolworths, will be judged on the evidence he already gave.

Official record ↗All hearing days
Suleiman Carrim - Day 159 of the Madlanga Commission

The day in brief

What you need to know

  • For the first time in its existence the Madlanga Commission resolved to lay criminal charges against a person summoned to give evidence.
  • Suleiman Carrim did not appear on 14 August 2026, the date the commission's 29 July ruling had ordered him to attend in person.
  • The ruling gave him one alternative to appearing: submit to an independent medical examination by a specialist agreed by 3 August, with a report to the commission by 12 August. He did not.
  • Chairperson Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga instructed the commission's secretary, Dr Nolitha Vukuza, to lay the charges - and was explicit that the commission would lay them, not merely recommend them.
  • Madlanga also ruled that Carrim will no longer be required to appear and that findings will be made on the evidence he gave on 9 and 10 March 2026.
  • Evidence leader Advocate Adila Hassim said the report received two days before the hearing was 'essentially an opinion by the same treating doctor' and did not address the daily outings.
  • The outings were the pivot: Carrim, said to be too unwell to testify, had been seen at Woolworths and Kauai.
  • His advocate Kameel Premhid argued a criminal referral was unnecessarily punitive and that his treating doctor had offered to testify privately instead.
  • Carrim is linked in evidence to an R360 million SAPS health services contract and to the co-funding of a police tender awarded to Vusimuzi 'Cat' Matlala.
  • The decision lands six weeks before the commission's 2 October 2026 evidence deadline, with scores of witnesses still to be heard.

Full coverage

The day, in depth

What actually happened on the day

Suleiman Carrim's chair was empty. His advocate, Kameel Premhid, arrived and appeared on his behalf; his client did not. That had been the pattern since March 2026, and the commission's 29 July ruling had been written to end it: Carrim was ordered to appear in person on 14 August, and would be excused only if he voluntarily submitted to an independent medical examination by a specialist agreed by no later than Monday 3 August, whose report - confirming he could not testify - had to reach the commission by 12 August. He did not agree to that examination. What arrived instead, two days before the hearing, was another report from his own treating doctor. Evidence leader Advocate Adila Hassim took the commission through the correspondence and characterised the document precisely: it was 'essentially an opinion by the same treating doctor', and it did not deal with the question the commission had actually asked.

Woolworths and Kauai

The reason the commission stopped accepting the medical account was not the medicine. It was the outings. The commission had before it evidence that a man too unwell to sit in a hearing room had been out at Woolworths and at Kauai, and that his treating doctor's explanation for authorising those outings had shifted over time. Madlanga put it to counsel in a sentence that will follow this ruling: 'From where I am sitting, they appear to have been outings even if you say they are not outings.' It is a mild formulation for a hard finding of fact about credibility, and it is the hinge of the whole day. Once the commission concluded that the incapacity was selective, every further postponement became a choice rather than a condition.

Laying charges, not recommending them

The distinction Madlanga drew matters more than the headline. Commissions of inquiry routinely refer matters onward - they recommend that the National Prosecuting Authority consider a prosecution, and the recommendation sits in a report nobody acts on for years. Madlanga said the commission would lay the charges itself. He instructed the commission's secretary, Dr Nolitha Vukuza, to initiate them. That converts a procedural frustration into a live police docket now, while the commission is still sitting, and it does so under the Commissions Act, which makes it an offence to fail to comply with a summons to appear. Whether a prosecution follows is a decision for the police and the prosecuting authority; the commission has taken the step that is within its own power and left the rest where it belongs.

The evidence stands, and findings will be made on it

The second half of the ruling is the part that costs Carrim most. Madlanga held that he will no longer be required to appear, and that the commission will make its findings on the evidence he already gave on 9 and 10 March 2026. Counsel had submitted that with limited time remaining it was appropriate for the commission to make findings on the evidence already before it. The consequence is that Carrim's account of the allegations against him is now closed at whatever he said in March - he has forfeited the opportunity to answer what has been led since, and there has been a great deal of it. A witness who avoids the stand to avoid the questions ends up being assessed on an incomplete record of his own making.

Why the commission cared this much about one businessman

Carrim is not a peripheral figure. He is linked in evidence to an R360 million SAPS health services contract and to the co-funding of a police tender awarded to Vusimuzi 'Cat' Matlala - the businessman whose relationship with senior police officials runs through the spine of this inquiry. The commission has spent months on how police procurement was allegedly used to buy influence and protection; Carrim sits at the funding end of that question. His evidence is not a side issue the commission could comfortably do without, which is exactly why it kept accommodating him and why, in the end, it stopped.

The clock in the room

This ruling cannot be read apart from the calendar. President Cyril Ramaphosa's 9 July extension fixed the commission's evidence deadline at 2 October 2026 and its report at 16 November 2026. Crime and justice campaigner Yusuf Abramjee did the arithmetic publicly the same day: roughly 35 working days of oral testimony left, if there is no recess, and scores of witnesses still to be heard. A commission with unlimited time can absorb a witness who postpones five times. A commission with six weeks cannot. The Carrim decision is what deadline pressure looks like when it reaches the point of principle: the inquiry has decided that its own process has to be enforceable if the rest of the schedule is to mean anything.

In their words

Key moments from the record

“From where I am sitting, they appear to have been outings even if you say they are not outings.”
Madlanga on the outings. Chairperson Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga to Suleiman Carrim's counsel, Madlanga Commission, 14 August 2026, on evidence that a man too unwell to testify had been out at Woolworths and Kauai.
“Essentially an opinion by the same treating doctor.”
Hassim on the medical report. Evidence leader Advocate Adila Hassim on the report received two days before the hearing, in place of the independent assessment the commission's 29 July ruling required.
“The commission has a duty and the power to regulate its own processes.”
The commission on its own authority. Advocate Adila Hassim, arguing that the commission had to act on the non-compliance rather than accommodate it again, 14 August 2026.

Our analysis

The bottom line

This is the first time the Madlanga Commission has used the enforcement power it has always had. That is the significance - not that one businessman is in trouble, but that the cost of not turning up has changed for everyone still on the witness list. Six weeks from the evidence deadline, that signal is worth more to the inquiry than Carrim's testimony would have been.

The ruling is also carefully limited, and that limitation is what makes it defensible. The commission has made no finding that Carrim is guilty of anything alleged against him in the procurement evidence. The charge concerns one thing only: failing to comply with a summons to appear. Madlanga separated the two cleanly, and left the question of whether to prosecute where it belongs, with the police and the prosecuting authority.

Premhid's argument deserves to be recorded rather than dismissed. He submitted that a criminal referral was unnecessarily punitive and that a less intrusive means existed - the treating doctor could testify privately and be questioned on the reports. It is a reasonable submission. It failed because the commission had already concluded that the treating doctor's evidence was the thing in doubt, which meant more of it could not resolve the doubt.

The real loss is evidentiary, and it is the commission's as much as Carrim's. Findings will now be made about an R360 million health services contract and the co-funding of a Matlala tender on the basis of two days of evidence given in March, before most of the record that bears on it existed. A witness who stays away does not make the questions go away. He only removes his own answer from the record.

Analysis is the archive’s own comment on the public proceedings, grounded in the record above. It weighs the evidence and the process; questions of individual guilt are for the courts and the commission to decide. Everyone named is presumed innocent.

On the record

Who testified this day

Testified · criminal charges to be laid

Suleiman Carrim

Businessman

View profile →

Follow the threads

Who Suleiman Carrim connects to

Accuses of deceiving him

Oupa 'Brown' Mogotsi

Carrim testified that Mogotsi and Matlala 'played' him into loaning millions towards the R360m SAPS Medicare24 tender. Mogotsi denies wrongdoing; untested.

View profile →Same R360m Medicare24 tender

Michael van Wyk

Both are tied to the irregular R360m SAPS Medicare24 health-services tender at the centre of the inquiry - Carrim as an alleged funder of Matlala, van Wyk as Medicare24 Holdings CEO. Untested; both presumed innocent.

View profile →Alleged funder of him

Vusimuzi 'Cat' Matlala

Evidence leaders described Carrim, with Hangwani Maumela, as one of the apparent funders behind Matlala's R360m Medicare24 tender; Carrim says Matlala and Mogotsi 'played' him. On Day 160 Matlala confirmed he approached Carrim for funding and put the loan at R15 million - Carrim told the commission in March it was R10 million, a discrepancy Carrim will not now be asked about because findings on him will be made on his March evidence alone. Untested allegations.

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Zoom out

Related case files

Case file · Tender fraud

Medicare24 SAPS tender

A R360 million police medical tender, about R228 million paid, a web of alleged funders - and a central accused who pleaded guilty, then withdrew the deal and now heads to trial.

Read the case file →

In the room & on the record

Counsel, the panel and sources

Evidence led by

  • Advocate Adila Hassim SC

On the panel

  • Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga (chairperson)

Sources

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