Chief Justice Raymond Zondo missed the court-ordered deadline to submit the final report on state capture by Wednesday, and is expected to do so via email “sometime” on Sunday night.
A printed copy of the fifth and final section of the state capture inquiry report will be handed over to President Cyril Ramaphosa in a ceremony at the Union Buildings on Monday at 6pm.
One source suggested the two biggest volumes in this section concern the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) and the State Security Agency (SSA).
According to state capture inquiry secretary Itumeleng Mosala in a statement issued on Saturday, unspecified challenges held up the last report’s completion on time.
Zondo was, by a high court order issued in April, required to send Ramaphosa his ultimate report by midnight on Wednesday, June 15. The final document, set to include an executive summary, could name the grand architect of state capture.
In April, while motivating for yet more time, Zondo told the high court the final report covers six topics. They were: the Estina dairy scam, SA Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), SSA, Prasa, the 2013 landing of the Guptas’ private jet at Waterkloof air force base and the bigger picture of state capture.
Business Day confirmed this with two sources who know of the commission’s ongoing work that the six volumes feature. Early last week, both said Zondo was intent on meeting the deadline, working with staff through the night in a hurry to file.
The sources had expected the report to be sent electronically very late on Wednesday night. Three day’s later a statement from the commission gave no explanation on the delay, but promised the report “will now be certainly” submitted “during the evening” on Sunday.
Previously, and usually within several hours of receiving previous reports, the Office of the Presidency uploaded digital versions of the volumes online. This time around, the public could wait until after the concluding handover to see PDFs online.
In late April, a mistakenly optimistic Zondo told the high court the last section could be complete in as little as six weeks’ time, with an additional two weeks preferred for adding final touches. Zondo admitted in an SABC News interview he sent the second-last (or, fourth) section to Ramaphosa at 3am on April 28.
He obtained the eighth court-ordered extension in late April. Zondo’s first application for more time, heard in July 2018, allowed hearings to continue. More recent pleas have been for finalising the report, but Zondo suggested he could still apply for a ninth extension to wind up administration.
Once the final report is submitted, Ramaphosa will take four months to develop his action plan for implementing the remedial action in Zondo’s magnus opus. In May, he wrote to parliament confirming he would present his plan on October 15. But with Zondo’s latest delay, Ramaphosa could move it to October 19.
Remedial action in former public protector advocate Thuli Madonsela’s “State of Capture” report of October 2016 stipulated the commission should last only 180 days. It has run for four years and exceeded a R1bn budget.
The entire cost of state capture is unknown, but estimated to run into billions of rand. Paul Holden, director of the non-government organisation (NGO) Shadow World Investigations, analysed illicit money flows in financial records for Gupta-linked entities.
He assessed SA government contracts tainted by state capture, including those involving the Guptas. “Of about R57bn’s worth of contracts awarded by the SA government in contracts tainted by state capture ... the Gupta family earned from that about R16bn,” Holden said in a June 7 TV interview.
Over four years Zondo and the commission’s team, including lawyers and investigators, failed to meet deadlines, as the scope of the inquisitorial process widened. Some have criticised this, but others are sympathetic.
According to the commission’s website, the inquiry held 430 hearings. It counts 479 affidavits and statements totalling 161,070 pages and its testimony transcripts run into 76,206 pages.
Lawson Naidoo, executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the SA Constitution (Casac) said: “Ultimately we want a proper report.”
Stefanie Fick from the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa), highlighted the “enormous amount of evidence” the commission had gathered.
“At this stage, I would prefer the drafters of the report to have the time required to do the report to the best of their ability,” Karam Singh, executive director of Corruption Watch, told Business Day in April.
When applying for the eighth extension, Zondo told the high court: “We all want to complete this task. There is no-one who wants this finished more than I do.”
Ramaphosa made Zondo the chief justice in March, before the inquiry ended. The promotion, while Zondo was still leading a commission in which some witnesses implicated Ramaphosa in alleged wrongdoing, raised eyebrows in some circles. Zondo began his two-and-a-half-year term as judicial leader in April.
But other saw Zondo’s appointment as a win for Ramaphosa’s so-called new dawn agenda, because Zondo presided over an inquiry into state capture, corruption and fraud. He resisted politicians’ attacks on the judiciary, including from those associated with the so-called Radical Economic Transformation (RET) camp.
Zondo is expected to chair the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) interview with Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) leader justice Mandisa Maya on Monday before the evening handover. Ramaphosa has tipped her to join Zondo as the judiciary’s second-in-command.
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