President Cyril Ramaphosa’s lawyers have accused public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane of unlawfully using information contained in a report by the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) to make adverse findings on his CR17 election campaign funding.
The standoff between Ramaphosa’s lawyers and the FIC comes as North Gauteng High Court judge president Dunstan Mlambo on Monday issued a statement condemning a “scurrilous fake news” Twitter campaign.
The campaign said that judges who had ruled in favour of Ramaphosa and Pravin Gordhan in their court battles with Mkhwebane had received hundreds of thousands of rand in payments from CR17. Data analysis of the Twitter accounts linked to the campaign shows they are largely aligned to the EFF and are proponents of “radical economic transformation”.
Ramaphosa has described Mkhwebane’s report on his campaign funding as legally and factually flawed and is challenging its validity in the high court in Pretoria.
In a letter sent to lawyers for the FIC last week, Ramaphosa’s attorney Peter Harris argued that Mkhwebane had violated the FIC Act by using the intelligence it provided to her office as evidence in her report on the CR17 campaign’s funding. This was despite an explicit statement by the FIC director, Xolisile Khanyile, that this information was “not evidence and is to be used for intelligence purposes only”.
“The public protector’s reliance on the information contained in the FIC report as evidence is a clear contravention of the condition imposed by the FIC director in terms of section 40 (3) of the act,” Harris said. This amounted to a clear “misuse” of FIC information.
As the FIC itself defines such abuse of its information as a criminal offence, Harris asked the centre “to provide us with information in relation to the steps that it has taken, or intends to take to address the criminal offences committed by the public protector”.
“Does the FIC intend to lay criminal charges against the public protector in respect of her misuse of the information supplied to her?” he asked.
The FIC’s lawyers yesterday responded to Harris’s letter by stating that they were not going to answer his questions.
The FIC has said before that the CR17 bank accounts were flagged for alleged “suspicious and unusual activity”, independent of Mkhwebane’s request for information. This required the centre to further investigate and seek additional information about the accounts in question.
Ramaphosa’s lawyers have demanded the reports on these investigations.
The public protector’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
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