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Defender Wim Trengove for President Cyril Ramaphosa says that public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane made “mistakes so obvious and so glaring that no lawyer acting in good faith could have made” in her conclusion that Ramaphosa had misled parliament about the funding of his 2017 ANC presidential campaign.
The Constitutional Court (ConCourt) was hearing a request from Mkhwebane on Thursday to review a higher court ruling that annulled his report and ordered him to pay a punitive cost order.
Trengove argued that in his report, Mkhwebane had read and misquoted the code of executive ethics that he found Ramaphosa had violated, and combined the concepts of deliberately and inadvertently misleading parliament, errors that Trengove said were “symptomatic” of the “reckless attempt to nail “of the public protector the president”.
Trengove said that Ramaphosa had not misled parliament when he responded to a parliamentary question from former DA Mmusi Maimane leader about the payment of 500,000 rand to his son, Andile, by the former Bosasa chief executive, the late Gavin Watson.
READ MORE: Ramaphosa’s answer to parliament ‘remains false’, Mkhwebane tells ConCourt
Ramaphosa had answered a question about a payment Watson made to his son, “so there is absolutely no basis to conclude that he deliberately misled parliament,” Trengove said.
Trengove said it was a “completely false” finding by Mkhwebane that there was prima facie evidence or suspicion of money laundering in the flow of money to fund the campaign.
Trengove added that Mkhwebane had no evidence of money laundering in the R500,000 that was donated by Bosasa to the Ramaphosa campaign.
The fact that in his report Mkhwebane had referred to the Prevention and Combating Corrupt Activities Act rather than the Prevention of Organized Crime Act when dealing with the suspicion of money laundering, leads to an irrational assessment, Trengove said.
“That was the reason [to nail the president] behind the findings of the public protector, ”Trengove said.
Trengove said Mkhwebane should have given Ramaphosa the opportunity to respond to his corrective action proposal and further argued that it was not the responsibility of the public protector to direct the national director of public prosecutions on how to implement his corrective action.
Trengove wants the ConCourt to refrain from interfering with the high court’s punitive cost order against Mkhwebane and to censure the fact that the public protector failed to explain the gross errors in her report, her persistence in finding that Ramaphosa had misled parliament. and the insinuation of money laundering. without evidence.
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