THE MISSING MILLIONS

We speak to neighbours of the woman who allegedly stole R4 million while on duty as a cash-in-transit security guard

- SIYA TSEWU

THERE was no gunfire, no screeching tyres, no blaring sirens and no panicky shoppers scattering across the aisles.

In fact, this heist at Africa’s largest shopping mall, the Mall of Africa in Midrand, was so quiet nobody knew it was happening and the details of the stolen cash emerged only about seven months later.

It was an otherwise ordinary morning in July last year when Bathobile Mlangeni (29), a security guard at one of the biggest cash-in-transit companies in SA, allegedly strolled out of the mall’s basement- level cash depot wheeling a shopping trolley filled with refuse bags stuffed with R4 million in cash.

She didn’t report for work again, and so far efforts by the police and her employer, SBV Secure Solutions, to trace her have been fruitless.

In fact, she seems to have vanished into thin air.

Bathobile was on duty for SBV – a company that processes, moves and manages cash and high-value assets – on the day of the robbery. She allegedly used a pair of scissors to cut open two bulk cash bags and transferred the R4m into refuse bags, which she put in a trolley and wheeled out of the depot, alone and unnoticed.

Residents of Mtwesi Street in the modest Soweto neighborhood where she’s believed to have lived to react in one of two ways when her name is mentioned: fear or admiration.

When we visit, people are outside, sweeping their stoeps, painting their walls and generally getting on with their lives.

They don’t seem to be too rattled that one of their neighbors is accused of such a crime. In fact, many of them say they don’t know anything about her.

But a few acknowledge that they know exactly who she is – and they’re nervous at the mere mention of her name.

At a modest face-brick house, an elderly woman believed to be Bathobile’s aunt, says she won’t talk to any media.