Cape Town, Western Cape — The South African Police Service is under intense scrutiny after an amaBhungane investigation revealed that SAPS allegedly purchased nearly 3,000 litres of diesel from a fuel company associated with alleged 28s gang boss Ralph Stanfield — while detectives were actively pursuing an organised crime case against him. With Stanfield’s high-stakes Prevention of Organised Crime Act (POCA) trial scheduled to begin on October 19, the revelations have exposed what experts describe as catastrophic breakdowns in procurement oversight at multiple levels of the police hierarchy.
Policing and security analyst Jeremy Veary said the transactions should never have passed through the system if even basic due diligence had been applied.
“If you had done a simple search on CAS — the Crime Administration System — you would have picked up that in 2014, we took a case to trial against Ralph Stanfield, Nicole Johnson, and about 17 other members of the 28 gang leadership, together with three members of the Central Firearm Registry, on the false procurement of firearm licenses in a period of five days,” Veary explained. “Nicole Johnson’s name would have popped up in that investigation because she was one of the persons arrested together with Ralph Stanfield.”
Johnson, who is Stanfield’s wife, registered the service station on the Central Supplier Database in 2021 despite being under sequestration at the time.
A Paper Trail of Missed Red Flags
The procurement documentation reviewed in the investigation reveals a chain of approvals that should have triggered alarm at every stage. Purchase orders bear the stamps of station commanders, supply chain officers, and provincial procurement officials. All transactions were deliberately kept below the R300,000 threshold — the limit at which procurement authority rests at the provincial headquarters and divisional level, including the national training structure tied to the Bishop Lavis Police Academy.
Veary highlighted that the Lentegeur police station’s procurement documents even carry approval stamps from Mitchell’s Plain police station, which functions as an accounting “mega station” overseeing financial matters for surrounding precincts.
“There are several people and chinks in the chain right through to province, right to the provincial head of support services, where this transaction could have been flagged by simple due diligence at various levels,” Veary said. “Mitchells Plain particularly is inexcusable, because when I was there, we arrested Ralph Stanfield right in Mitchells Plain — and Nicole Johnson — for the very firearms case.”
The Geography Doesn’t Add Up
Beyond the paperwork failures, the physical logistics of the procurement defy practical explanation. An Engen service station sits in Clangano Crescent almost directly adjacent to the Nyanga police station. The Lentegeur area also has multiple filling stations within a 200-metre radius, including an Engen and a BP. Yet SAPS units opted to source diesel from a station in Bishop Lavis, roughly nine kilometres away, located on John Ramsey Avenue — a residential road next to a school that is not a major business route.
Veary dismissed any suggestion that load shedding emergencies could justify the arrangement. “If you need emergency supply, it would be the one in closest proximity to you because you’re dealing with an emergency to run a generator that might go down at any time,” he said. “It’s a long-term transaction. It’s not a short-term transaction in an emergency. The police do not plan critical provisioning without a standby contract with a particular service provider.”
A Service Station With a Long History of Irregularities
The Bishop Lavis filling station itself has been a subject of law enforcement interest for decades. According to Veary, the station was originally controlled by Ralph Stanfield’s uncle, Colin Stanfield, an alleged drug dealer who was investigated in 1996 on a R12 million tax fraud matter. Colin Stanfield held the station and numerous other assets — including properties, a hotel, liquor outlets, and Pat Constandinus rondavels — inside a trust structure that shielded them from seizure.
“During one operation at his house in Valhalla Park, we found R4.5 million in cash right there in his house being counted with him present,” Veary recalled. “He claimed not to read and write, and declared his income as coming from selling vegetables and walking. We all know what it really was.”
Colin Stanfield died of a heart attack before the tax fraud case concluded. Ralph Stanfield and Johnson subsequently inherited the empire, which Veary said continues to operate through similar business practices, including a cosmetics care chain and other ventures whose profit margins do not align with their apparent revenue.
The filling station was previously flagged during investigations into abnormal fuel volumes passing through its tanks — quantities that exceeded the physical capacity of the station’s storage infrastructure.
Mozambique Fuel Route Raises Further Concerns
Perhaps the most troubling dimension of the scandal involves the origin of the diesel itself. Veary confirmed that the fuel is sourced via Mozambique, a corridor historically linked to the Stanfield family’s alleged drug trafficking operations dating back to the 1970s and 1980s.
“The traditional route of Mandrax — of Colin’s empire and all the other people from the 70s and 80s — has been the Mozambican route and the Zambian route,” Veary said. “I am not surprised that the procurement channel comes via Mozambique because there are other established networks from Colin Stanfield’s time and other mega drug dealers in the Western Cape on the Mandrax route who worked via Mozambique.”
He added that substandard diesel from such sources had previously damaged police generators at Nyanga, requiring a full system cleanup. “Usually these dicey diesel procurement projects involve substandard diesel, and this is an essential service we are talking about,” he warned.
Calls for Accountability
Veary called for a comprehensive investigation into every officer who signed off on the purchase orders, including station commanders and the head of support services in the Western Cape during the period in question.
“I hope they are subject to a lifestyle-type investigation and a thorough investigation into their income sources, because they cannot explain their non-compliance with their own procedures and cannot explain the lack of due diligence in such an obvious, blatant matter as this — with people who are well known as 28 gang leaders in this province,” he said.
As Stanfield’s POCA trial approaches, the scandal has laid bare what appears to be a systemic failure of integrity within SAPS supply chain management — a situation Veary described as “bizarre” and fundamentally incompatible with the mandate of a law enforcement agency.
“We depend on supply chain. We depend on the integrity of those handling procurement processes to ensure we have the best quality product,” Veary concluded. “Ultimately, we can’t be investigating a firm and then have that firm supply us with fuel. It is inexcusable.”
