EFF appeal over public protector’s report ‘absurd’

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s lawyers have slammed as “absurd” an attempt by the EFF to appeal against the invalidation of public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s damaging report about his election campaign funding.

They say the party has made no effort to actually even defend  her “hopelessly flawed” findings.

Ramaphosa’s lawyers have also taken issue with both the EFF’s insistence that the president deliberately lied to parliament about a R500,000 donation his CR17 campaign received from now deceased Bosasa CEO Gavin Watson. 

While Mkhwebane has turned to the Constitutional Court in her efforts to challenge the scathing Pretoria high court ruling that found her report on Ramaphosa’s CR17 campaign to be legally and factually flawed, the EFF has sought leave to appeal against that judgment in the Supreme Court of Appeal.

But, in papers filed at the Appeal Court, Ramaphosa’s lawyers accuse the party of making no effort to actually defend Mkhwebane’s report on its own merits.

Instead, they say the EFF is seeking to challenge the high court’s decision “based on arguments which were not advanced in the main application, on factual conjectures, and trivial disagreements with the findings of this court”.

“The EFF ignores the public protector’s actual findings and her actual reasons for those findings.

“It argues instead that the public protector could or should have made other adverse findings against the president for new reasons conjured up by the EFF,” they state.

Mkhwebane’s investigation into Ramaphosa’s CR17 campaign funding, which she insists was a legitimate attempt to hold the executive to account, can arguably be described as one of the biggest political headaches of his two-year term in office.

The public protector contended that the R200m raised for CR17 could result in “state capture” and ordered that the National Prosecuting Authority investigate the “prima facie” evidence of money-laundering she claimed to have uncovered during her probe.

She further found that Ramaphosa had deliberately lied to parliament.

After he was asked by then DA leader  Mmusi Maimane about a Bosasa payment made to his son Andile, Ramaphosa confirmed that his son had signed a consulting agreement with the corruption-accused facilities management company.

Days later, however, he wrote to then speaker of parliament Baleka Mbete and revealed that the payment was, in fact, a donation to CR17.

The Pretoria high court found that, on the law and on the facts, Mkhwebane’s finding that Ramaphosa had deliberately misled parliament was hopelessly flawed and set it aside.

But the EFF now argues that, because Ramaphosa sought to distance himself from the CR17 operations and thereby avoid any potential conflict of interest, he placed himself in a position of “wilful ignorance” that “had the purpose or effect of frustrating his duty to account to parliament”.

By taking these steps, the EFF argues, Ramaphosa deliberately misled parliament because “he knew (or ought to have known) it would mean he would not be able to account to parliament for things that he  had a duty to account for (that is everything)”.

The party further contends that Ramaphosa had a “duty of full knowledge” — an argument that the president’s lawyers argue is “not only entirely new but also absurd”.

“The foundation of its new case, that the constitution requires the president to know everything and to disclose everything to parliament, is plainly absurd,” they state. — BusinessLIVE