Cape Town — Newly appointed Correctional Services Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula has given her full backing to the decision of her predecessor, Ngconde Balfour , not to refer the controversial medical parole of convicted fraudster Schabir Shaik to the parole review board *1.

Critics of the decision to parole Shaik, President Jacob Zuma ’s former financial adviser, appealed first to Balfour, then to former president Kgalema Motlanthe and finally to Mapisa-Nqakula for the matter to go to the review board. All requests were refused on the grounds that there was no evidence to support such a move.

Shaik, sentenced to 15 years in prison, was released early after having served two years and four months of his sentence, most of it in a prison hospital.

Despite the insistence of his family that he was very ill, it was reported in the past week that he had been seen dining out at an up-market restaurant in Umhlanga to celebrate a family birthday.

Mapisa-Nqakula said yesterday it was with surprise that she learnt there was no such thing as a general medical parole but only a parole to allow terminally ill prisoners to die with their families in dignity.

Despite doubts that Shaik is indeed terminally ill, she is standing by Balfour’s decision not to refer the case to the review board.

Introducing her budget vote in an extended committee of the National Assembly, she said that the heading in the law of “parole on medical grounds” was misleading because the section was limited to the release on parole of an offender diagnosed as being in the final phases of terminal illness.

“I have requested the correctional supervision and parole review board, through its chairman Judge Siraj Desai, to review the application of this section and to make proposals to me with regard to medical parole in the broader sense,” Mapisa-Nqakula said.

With acknowledgements to Wyndham Hartley and Business Day.