time that the NIA needed to accelerated its transformation into an institution whose personnel reflect the demographic profile of the country as a whole, united by a commitment to the new, non-racial South Africa and attain "full representivity" in gender, disability and race. A NIA spokesperson, in November 1999, responded to claims by the Democratic Alliance (DA) of the bugging of their Western Province offices from an adjacent Government building saying there was no reason for surveillance of the organisation, despite the DA ever alleging it was the NIA. During the same month, a Ministry of Intelligence spokesperson said an investigation was under way to investigate claims made in a South African paper, that the NIA were running a counter-intelligence operation against the German Embassy since 1995 after it was claimed the latter was attempting to recruit South African citizens. The paper also claimed that the NIA had attempted to recruit German Embassy workers to establish the reasons for the Germans security services effort and had established a surveillance operation from a house opposite the embassy. On 18 November 1999, a covert security camera had been found in a waste bin opposite the German Embassy which officials would claim was part of an anti-crime operation and not the monitoring of visitors to the building. In October 1998, police would arrest two members of the NIA after they attempted to cash stolen share certificates worth more than R180 million and the two were also linked to a financial brokerage which had accepted three illegal promissory notes from the Mpumalanga Parks Board, which had been used to secure a R340 million offshore loan. It was said the two members of the NIA had been laundering money through the brokerage and had claimed it was part of a NIA operation to against foreign exchange control violations. When the certificates were cashed by the brokerage in January 1999, the buyer, BFS Capital, established they were stolen and two brokerage members arrested. The two brokerage members later have the charges dropped would later have the charges dropped against them but the brokerage was closed down by the Reserve Bank, but one member would later be arrested in the United States for extradition to Switzerland for fraud. The two NIA members said they would disclose their handlers involvement in court in June 2000, though the handler insisted to the police that the two NIA members had