A Pietermaritzburg private hospital at the centre of a tax evasion scandal is also under investigation by the Hawks over claims that its owners bribed Health Department officials to overlook registration deficiencies.

The Mail & Guardian reports that Daymed Private Hospital and its owner, Navind Dayanand, were charged with multiple counts of tax evasion, pay as you earn tax and refund fraud last month, over which the doctor and his wife Nerupa, the hospital’s financial manager, and several former staff members, are out on bail.

They appear in court again in February. 

Dayanand is also being investigated by the Hawks for an alleged R100 000 bribe paid to former Health Department officials to facilitate the hospital’s re-registration in 2015, after his former accountant, Brendan Pillay, turned whistle-blower allegedly in retaliation for being fired.

An internal investigation appointed in 2017 was unable to prove that R100 000 – R50 000 of which was paid by Daymed into an official’s mother’s bank account – was a bribe because of capacity constraints preventing them from taking the matter further.

The Health Department then asked the police to investigate the corruption claims.

The department also investigated the appointment of Dayanand’s son, Reshal, as a doctor at the Northdale Hospital in 2015, finding that he had lied about his qualifications, which were never subject to verification, and had not completed his medical degree at the time. 

Reshal is also being investigated by the Hawks for qualification fraud, after both the University of KZN, from which he claimed to have a medical degree, and the Health Department laid charges against him, reports the M&G.

University investigators had to be given bodyguards and moved to safehouses at a cost of R30m after they received death threats for their investigation into Navind and other alleged degree fraudsters implicated in the investigations, dubbed Operation Clever by the authorities.

Four years later, neither father nor son has been charged over either act of alleged corruption, despite the ‘ongoing’ investigations by the Hawks and the NPA. Navind claimed he was the victim of a vendetta by Pillay, who he had fired for alleged qualifications fraud and who had, in response, presented dossiers about alleged corruption at Daymed to the authorities to try to put him out of business.

Navind, a prominent member of the Pietermaritzburg medical fraternity who started Daymed, of which he is sole proprietor, in 2003, said the bribery allegations and the charges laid against him by the tax authorities were ‘nonsense’.

Full Mail & Guardian report