Ms Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Mr Nelson Mandela who was once acclaimed as the "Mother of the Nation", has pleaded not guilty to 85 counts of fraud and theft involving nearly one million rand (€100,708).
The charge relates to an alleged scam to obtain loans for non-existent employees of the African National Congress Women's League. She heads the Women's League and represents it on the national executive committee of the ANC. If convicted, she could be sentenced to imprisonment for 15 years.
Ms Madikizela-Mandela, who arrived at the courtroom in a limousine accompanied by her daughter, Zinzi, is alleged to have negotiated a loan with her co-accused, Mr Addy Moolman, for fictional ANC employees. Sixty women are alleged to have obtained loans, with the help of letters written on ANC Women's League's stationery. Ms Madikizela-Mandela purportedly signed most letters.
The state alleges R550,000 was later paid into her personal bank account. Ms Madikizela-Mandela, however, insists that she reported the fraudulent loans to the police.
A woman who reportedly had an affair with a lawyer after her husband was released from prison in 1990, Ms Madikizela-Mandela seems to have had the proverbial nine lives of a cat. She has had several scrapes with the law but has escaped imprisonment so far, though police detained her several times during the apartheid era.
Until now her encounters with the law - which include a conviction and six year prison sentence for kidnapping, reduced to a fine on appeal - do not seem to have diminished her popularity with the poor. She constantly champions them, accusing the ANC leadership of wanting to "sleep between silk sheets" and of betraying the people who voted them into power.
She is in trouble with the parliamentary ethics committee for failing to declare the R50,000 a month she said she received in donations. The R50,000 is well above the R17,000 a month she receives as a member of parliament. She refuses - with apparent impunity - to heed summons to appear before the ethics committee to explain her non-compliance with its rules.
President Thabo Mbeki has snubbed her in public (he rebuffed her proffered kiss on his cheek when she arrived late for a rally in Soweto). She had to endure another indignity: she was cold-shouldered by the ANC last month at the funeral of the former ANC Youth League president, Mr Peter Mokaba . In what may be a sign of a concerted move to oust her from within ANC formations, there are reports that she will be challenged when her latest term of Women's League president expires. She has survived previous attempts to oust her.
But a conviction for fraud can hardly be glorified (when she was charged with kidnapping the ANC issued a statement claiming she was the victim of political machinations by the apartheid government). South Africans are watching the trial with intense interest and, in some cases, not with a little glee at the possible fall of so controversial and formidable a woman.