Shivambu lashes out at ‘desperate’ Van Wyk over fresh VBS allegations

On Sunday, The Daily Maverick released their latest report detailing an alleged additional R1.46 million VBS Bank gifted the Shivambus for a home loan.

The EFF deputy president took to Twitter to respond and was unsurprisingly unimpressed.

The report, by Pauli Van Wyk alongside the publication’s investigative journalism unit Scorpio, cites leaked emails as showing Floyd Shivambu met with VBS chair Tshifhiwa Matodzi, who has been implicated in the alleged looting of the bank, after his brother Brian’s company Sgameka was turned down for a home loan.

The meeting appears to have worked, as a R1.46 million home loan was granted.

The report alleges this was in addition to the more than R16 million The Daily Maverick had originally accused Shivambu of personally receiving in its earlier stories, being the first to link Shivambu directly to the VBS scandal.

This comes after his brother was named in advocate Terry Motau’s report commissioned by Treasury, The Great Bank Heist, which implicated Brian alongside 52 others who allegedly received “gratuitous” payments from the bank as part of what is believed to have been its widespread looting.

READ MORE: Jacques Pauw deletes tweet revealing Malema’s family’s address

Shivambu took to Twitter, surprising no one by expressing his view that Van Wyk’s allegations hold no weight.

The EFF deputy president asked Van Wyk a series of questions: “So now the money you allege I got is R2.4 million? What happened to the R10 million? Since when are mortgages illegal?”

He also said the journalist was “desperate for relevance” and “dismally failing”.

He ended the tweet by wishing her luck in her “wild goose chase”.

The EFF has been slammed for threatening journalists, with the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) noting it was alarming that the threats were mainly aimed at women, and requesting a meeting with the party, which they refused.

In an extraordinarily angry tweet, EFF leader Julius Malema hit out at Van Wyk after she shared an editorial from the Mail & Guardian that was critical of him.

READ MORE: Malema tells ‘sick’ Pauli van Wyk: ‘Go to hell satan’

She wrote that Malema “has to take responsibility for violence meted out to journalists. He is stoking the flames of a campaign against journalists whose work he disputes … and ultimately endanger[s] the lives of journalists”.

Malema responded: “You are sick, go to hell satan.”

While Sanef was vocal in its disapproval of the EFF’s utterances, it has since also intervened in the party’s favour.

It came to Malema’s defence after investigative journalist Jacques Pauw shared a picture on Twitter of the Google Earth satellite image of the EFF leader’s family’s address, calling on Pauw to delete the tweet, which he did.

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