A court in South Africa has been asked to ground a private jet used by the wealthy Gupta family who have been accused of corruptly influencing the former president Jacob Zuma.
Export Development Canada (EDC), Canada’s state-run trade credit agency, has alleged the family’s businesses have defaulted on a $41m (£29.6m) loan for the Bombardier Global 6000 aircraft.
The Canadian-built aircraft has since disappeared, after the public tracking device was deactivated on 4 February, the court heard.
“As we sit today, my client cannot tell where the aircraft is,” EDC’s lawyer, Alfred Cockrell, told South Gauteng high court in Johannesburg.
EDC is petitioning for the aircraft to be grounded, wherever it is located, until its request to have the plane seized can be heard in an English court.
“All my clients want is for the aircraft to sit in a hangar somewhere so it can’t be flown to Dubai or India or somewhere,” said Cockrell.
EDC does not “want to sell this aircraft in the interim period, they just want the aircraft to be put in a safe place where it can be stored and where it cannot be used by the Guptas”.
Cockrell added that grounding the aircraft would not be an inconvenience for the Guptas as they would be able to charter another jet or fly first class.
Cockrell said EDC feared damage to the aircraft, reputational harm and that “the aircraft may be forfeited because it is the proceeds of crime”.
The Indian-born Guptas, one of South Africa’s wealthiest business families, are facing police investigations in the country over alleged corruption as well as their links to Zuma, who resigned after several corruption scandals.
Indian tax officials this week raided several properties belonging to the Gupta brothers in their former hometown as part of a money-laundering inquiry.
Last month, South African authorities raided Gupta properties in Johannesburg as part of the ongoing investigation into alleged corruption.
One of the three Gupta brothers, Ajay, was declared a fugitive from justice by police after he failed to respond to a summons.
Thirteen other people are facing charges linked to allegations that millions of dollars of public money meant for poor South African dairy farmers was embezzled by the Guptas. They are also accused of receiving highly favourable government contracts during Zuma’s presidency.
Led by Atul Gupta, the family arrived in South Africa in 1993 as white-minority apartheid rule crumbled, a year before Nelson Mandela won the country’s first democratic elections.
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