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- The lawyer representing President Cyril Ramaphosa says Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s appeal to the Constitutional Court is futile on the merits and should be dismissed.
- Ramaphosa attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi says Mkhwebane had no jurisdiction to investigate the CR17 campaign.
- In March, a plenary session of the Gauteng High Court ruled that Mkhwebane’s findings included material errors in the law.
The Constitutional Court should dismiss Public Protector Busisiswe Mkhwebane’s request to appeal a Gauteng High Court ruling that annulled its report on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s campaign because the case is “desperate” on its merits, says lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi SC.
Ngcukaitobi, who appeared on behalf of Ramaphosa, said Mkhwebane acted in violation of the Constitution because he had no jurisdiction to investigate a campaign like the CR17 campaign.
He said:
“We would say that the jurisdictional argument has simply not been fulfilled at all. It should dismiss the case on appeal because the case has no remedy on the merits.”
The Mkhwebane report found that Ramaphosa deliberately misled Parliament about a donation to his ANC presidential campaign (CR17).
In March, a full court ruled that Mkhwebane’s findings included material errors in the law.
READ | Funding for CR17 Campaign: Mkhwebane Attorneys Tell ConCourt It Has Jurisdiction to Investigate
The court determined that she did not have jurisdiction to investigate the financing of the CR17 campaign, News24 reported.
The court then annulled the July 2019 report and the corrective actions contained in the report.
This included corrective actions that ordered the President of Parliament and the National Director of the Public Ministry (NDPP) to carry out further investigations.
This included “directing” NDPP Shamila Batohi to investigate “suspected money laundering” and instructing the Speaker of the National Assembly, Thandi Modise, to refer the non-disclosure of Ramaphosa donations to the joint ethics committee, as well as order Ramaphosa to declare all donations to Campaign CR17.
The court also overturned the finding that Ramaphosa violated the Executive Members Ethics Act by failing to report the donations to Parliament, and ruled that he had not received any personal financial benefits and was not required to testify.
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The High Court also found that Mkhwebane exhibited a “total lack of basic knowledge of the law and its application.”
On Thursday, Ngcukaitobi told the judges that Mkhwebane had been found “missing.”
READ ALSO | Public Protector demands that donations made to the CR17 campaign be made public
“It’s clear he had a result. He had facts that were inconvenient, he dismissed them. He wanted to get to his result. That just shouldn’t be tolerated,” Ngcukaitobi said.
He also told the court that Ramaphosa was a major financier of the CR17 campaign.
“Mr [Wim] Trengove (also for Ramaphosa) was embarrassed to mention the figures, but I was not. The president paid R31 million to the campaign; paid another 6.2 million rand to the campaign. “
Earlier, Trengove told the court that Ramaphosa did not mislead Parliament, adding that Mkhwebane made two “very obvious mistakes,” adding that no bona fide lawyer could have made those mistakes.
“He also confused the concepts of deliberate and inadvertent behavior,” Trengove said.
He also said that the public protector “was wrong” and cited a variety of versions of the same provisions and also made “reckless determinations” to “nail the president.”
