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Chief Justice John Hlophe’s Court of Conduct has been postponed due to health concerns and a date clash with the Chief Justice’s lawyer in the UK.
The long-awaited Court of Judicial Conduct that will hear evidence about President John Hlophe’s alleged attempt by Western Cape judge to sway the Constitutional Court judges in 2008 in favor of former President Jacob Zuma has been postponed – again.
In June 2020 The JSC announced that the long-awaited tribunal was established to proceed between October 16 and 30, 2020. It has taken 12 years for the matter to finally reach this stage.
However, in a statement issued on October 20, JSC Secretary Seal Chiloane announced that the new dates set for the hearing are December 7-11.
This was because Hlophe’s legal representative in the matter, lawyer Courtney Griffiths QC (the man who represented Liberian dictator Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Court) was unavailable. Judge Chris Jafta’s poor health was also cited.
Griffiths, a high-profile, Jamaican-born British lawyer, is not cheap and some have negotiated his fees for representing Hlophe in the state attorney’s office.
Griffiths spent three years arguing at the ICC that former Liberian President Charles Taylor was not responsible for the horrors perpetrated during Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war.
In 2012 Taylor was convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes. He was acquitted of ordering these atrocities, including rapes and amputations.
Griffiths has called the ICC a “racist tool of American foreign policy.”
Hlophe has previously argued that South African lawyers would be reluctant to question South African Constitutional Court judges. – most of whom have died or retired. Griffiths would get rid of this supposed anxiety, Hlophe has suggested.
The complaint against Hlophe stems from allegations that, in March 2008, Hlophe had he approached Constitutional Court judges Jafta and Bess Nkabinde separately in their offices.
There he allegedly informed them that he would be the next president of the Supreme Court, that they should consider his future and rule in favor of Zuma in a matter of legality of seizures of 93,000 documents from various premises belonging to the next president.
Since then it has been a long and tortuous road for a matter of “this magnitude”, as the former Vice President of the Constitutional Court, Dikgang Moseneke wrote in his second book. Everybody get up – A judicial memory.
It was Moseneke, the then Chief Justice Pius Langa and nine other justices who filed the complaint against Hlophe with the JSC. Hlophe immediately filed a counterclaim.
As the case dragged on and South African taxpayers reportedly contributed, according to the Department of Justice, a total of R3.5 million in legal fees for Hlophe’s legal teams between November 2013 and October 2014 alone.
Legal representative of Hlophe in South Africa, Barnabas Xulu, currently fighting a court order seeking to seize his assets for reimbursement of legal fees owed to the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, he received R616,000 of this.
There is an ongoing dispute regarding the state’s payment of Hlophe’s legal fees in the saga and whether it should reimburse them if a court determines that he should be charged.
This is not the only issue in Hlophe’s long list of dealings with the JSC.
In July 2020 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Mogoeng mogoeng announced that it had recommended that Hlophe face another misconduct tribunal regarding the presiding judge’s alleged assault on Judge Mushtak Parker.
The complaint had been filed by Presiding Judge Patricia Goliath in January 2020.
Meanwhile, JSC has since recommended that Parker be suspended and face court for providing conflicting accounts of Hlophe’s alleged assault on him.
In addition to this, the Western Cape Chief Justice has been charged with making incorrect rulings in favor of Xulu’s clients.
In 2017, the Supreme Court of Appeals, in an ardent ruling, found that Hlophe may have been biased when it reversed an NPA preservation order awarded against Xulu’s client, Matthews Mulaudzi, without considering the state’s submissions.
Mulaudzi had fraudulently pocketed R48 million to which he was not entitled. It is unclear if the funds were ever recovered by Nedbank to whom the businessman had assigned an Old Mutual policy.
Hlophe has also been accused by the Minister of the Environment, Forestry and Fisheries, Barbara Creecy, of granting an order “in chambers” for the benefit of Xulu’s company, Barnabas Xulu Incorporated, in a DAFF matter.
The State Attorney, according to Working day, he had complained about Xulu’s 20,000 rand a day legal fees for his services on behalf of Hlophe in his various battles with the JSC. DM
