26 an offence under s 74(1) is that the licensee must outsource the construction or placing into service of the relevant electronic communications facility or electronic communications network to a third party. Similarly the provisions of s 276(2), upon which some reliance was also placed, do not warrant the restrictive construction of s 276(1) for which counsel contended. The opening words also make it clear that courts are bound to have regard to specific penal provisions in legislation. It does not follow that the absence of specific statutory penal provisions renders the court’s power to impose the sentences provided for in s 276 nugatory. On the contrary it is to those powers that courts must turn in imposing sentence. This has always been accepted in respect of common law crimes and there is no reason to confine it to those crimes. [33] Nor is there anything in the context of the statute to justify a restrictive construction. Historically the section is derived from s 242 of the Criminal Procedure Code enacted in Ordinance 1 of 1903 of the Transvaal. However that section simply specified the range of permissible sentences and did not say that courts were empowered to impose those sentences on offenders. Similarly there appears not to have been a provision in either of the Criminal Procedure Ordinances 40 in the Cape or the Criminal Procedure Ordinance 18 of 1845 (Natal) specifically empowering courts to impose sentences on offenders. When the Criminal Procedure Act 31 of 1917 was passed it took the earlier provision in the Transvaal Code as its basis but recast the section to say that the specified punishments ‘may be passed upon a convicted offender’. 41 That was done at a time when it was known that there were a number of statutory offences on the statute books and the possibility that the legislation in which they were contained might lack a penalty provision had arisen in 40 Ordinance 40 of 1828 and Ordinance 73 of 1830. 41 The 1917 Act was passed a few months after the decision in R v Forlee supra.