Rhino horn trafficker Dawie Groenewald fined R2m after landmark 16-year case

• Dawie Groenewald is expected to be sentenced to four years in prison or a R2-million fine, according to a plea agreement.
• One of his co-accused, Tielman Erasmus, will plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of a R100 000 fine or six months in jail.
• The plea deals follow delays in the case and the deaths of witnesses and accused.

Sixteen years after the spectacular arrest of notorious game farmer, hunting outfitter and rhino horn trafficker Dawie Groenewald, one of South Africa’s longest-running wildlife crime prosecutions grinds to an end this week, with Groenewald expected to plead guilty to hundreds of counts of racketeering, money laundering, fraud and defeating the ends of justice.

In terms of a plea agreement reached with the State, the 58-year-old Groenewald, a former police officer turned safari operator, is expected to pay a fine of R2 million or serve four years in prison, on the central charge of managing an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering, in contravention of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act. An additional 36 years’ imprisonment and fines totalling R10 million will be suspended for five years, provided Groenewald does not contravene environmental laws.

One of Groenewald’s co-accused, 49-year-old Tielman Erasmus, is also expected to plead guilty to charges of defeating the ends of justice and fraud, stemming from a leopard hunt. He is set to be sentenced to a fine of R100 000 or six months’ imprisonment, with a further 10 years’ imprisonment suspended.

News24 understands that both men have agreed to cooperate with the State, and the court is expected to separate their cases from those of the remaining accused, who will be tried separately.

Proceedings got under way in the Limpopo High Court on Wednesday morning.

A separate case in the Nelspruit Regional Court, Mpumalanga, in which Groenewald and professional hunter AB Steyn are charged with illegal possession and transportation of 19 rhino horns following their arrest in 2021 is continuing, although it, too, has been mired in delays. In April, the case was postponed yet again and will resume on 24 August.

Dwindling accused, ageing and dead witnesses

For the State, the plea deal draws a line under a prosecution that has lurched from one postponement to the next since 2010, and that has steadily lost witnesses and defendants due to death, relocation, withdrawal and earlier plea bargains. Of the original 11 accused, only five are left in the dock: Groenewald, Erasmus, veterinarian Karel Toet and his wife Marisa, and Koos Pronk, one of Toet’s employees.

Two accused, Paul Mathoromela and Gys du Preez, are dead, the latter by suicide. Groenewald’s ex-wife, Sariette, who was charged alongside him, divorced him in 2015 and brought a successful application for the withdrawal of charges against her.

The NPA earlier also accepted representations from veterinarian Manie du Plessis and pilot Dewald Gouws, and dropped the case against them. The case against another co-accused, professional hunter Nardus Rossouw, was also settled with a plea. Groenewald’s brother Janneman, who was indicted alongside him in the United States in 2014 on charges of conspiracy and fraud, died suddenly in December 2018.

Following the 2010 arrests, prosecutors threw the book at the accused. The indictment ran to 637 pages, and 185 witnesses were lined up to testify. Groenewald stood accused of killing dozens of his own rhinos for their horns, then getting rid of the carcasses by burying them, burning them or selling them to a local butchery. He was also accused of illegally dehorning dozens of animals and selling at least 384 rhino horns over a four-year period.

It is understood that the NPA weighed the plea agreement against the state of its case. Of the 185 witnesses, 10 have died, some have emigrated or dispersed to other parts of the country, and some are battling serious mental health problems. The oldest witness is now in his 80s.

In a submission that sits awkwardly with the case’s early notoriety, the State noted that no rhinos had been poached. At the time of the arrests in 2010, a police spokesperson described the case – the result of a 15-month investigation codenamed “Project Cruiser” – as a “huge stride in our undying effort to combat rhino poaching” and claimed – incorrectly – that the Groenewald group were linked to “hundreds of rhino poaching incidents”.

Groenewald killed his own rhinos, prosecutors have conceded, while rhinos belonging to other private owners were dehorned unlawfully but not killed.

A case that came to stand for a crisis

When Groenewald was arrested in 2010, rhino poaching was front-page news. That year, poachers killed 333 rhinos in South Africa, more than double the previous year’s toll, and the figure would climb for most of the decade that followed. His arrest – timed to coincide with World Rhino Day in September 2010 – was held up at the time as proof that the State could reach the wealthy white hunting and game industry insiders supplying rhino horn to criminal syndicates in Vietnam, Laos and China, not just poachers entering reserves and national parks as cannon fodder for Mozambican and South African poaching gangs.

The prosecution that followed was billed as the largest wildlife crime case in South African history, with the accused originally facing more than 1 800 charges. Groenewald was released on R1 million bail, said to be the highest ever set in a South African wildlife case, and in 2012, the State seized about R55 million in assets from the group. The asset forfeiture was subsequently overturned in court.

Controversy in Botswana and Zimbabwe

Even as the Limpopo and Mpumalanga cases ground on, Groenewald surfaced in a dispute on the fringes of Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Through his company, DK Superior, according to a report by the Oxpeckers Centre for Investigative Environmental Journalism, he became the contested operator of NG13, a trophy-hunting concession managed for San communities by the Tcheku Community Trust.

Community members objected that a man awaiting trial for wildlife trafficking had been handed the lease, and accused Botswana’s former justice minister, Machana Ronald Shamukuni, of using his political influence to swing the deal. Shamukuni, who later became a director of DK Superior, denies wrongdoing, as does Groenewald, who says he signed the lease on the politician’s behalf and that the concession is not his. In March 2026, the community moved to push him out.

Groenewald has also been embroiled in controversy in Zimbabwe amid accusations this year that he swindled American and Canadian clients. Over the course of a 10-day expedition in Hwange National Park and the Matetsi Private Game Reserve, Groenewald and an associate allegedly hunted without permits, used foreign-registered vehicles, bribed two state rangers and abandoned wounded animals. According to Oxpeckers, the North Americans went home without their trophies, while the Zimbabwean professional hunters who fronted for the South Africans say they remain unpaid.