Constitution gives Ramaphosa ‘privacy’, court hears

The CR17 campaign committee has shot back at the Economic Freedom Fighters’ legal bid to unseal the funding records of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2017 campaign for the ruling party’s top spot, with advocate Wim Trengrove describing the documents as “the fruit of an unlawful investigation”.

“The very investigation in the course of which these private bank statements had been obtained was an unlawful investigation,” he argued in the High Court in Pretoria yesterday.

In July 2019, Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane released a contentious report on the CR17 campaign – which ultimately saw Ramaphosa elected leader of the ANC at the party’s 54th national conference in 2017, paving the way for his presidency.

Mkhwebane’s report focused, in part, on a R500 000 donation to the campaign, made by Gavin Watson – the late former chief executive of Bosasa – and found Ramaphosa had breached the executive ethics code by not disclosing the benefaction.

It also found he had misled parliament, as well as that there was “merit” to the suspicion of money laundering. The report was, however, reviewed and set aside by a full bench of the court last March.

Mkhwebane has approached the Constitutional Court with an application for leave to appeal. Trengrove argued yesterday the law was clear that bank statements were private.

He said this constitutionally protected privacy trumped any public interest argument for these bank statements to be made public.

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