Minister Pravin Gordhan, Johann van Loggerenberg and Ivan Pillay have official been cleared. SARS has been order to pay up for damages caused and apologise. Kieswetter says it was the plan all along.
There is no ‘SARS Rogue Unit’. This is has been the final ruling by the Constitutional Court that has found – after enduring false allegations against them for close to a decade – that false allegations against several senior SARS officials, including Minister Pravin Gordhan, High-Risk Investigations Unit head Johann van Loggerenberg and former SARS deputy commissioner Ivan Pillay, were in fact not true.
The ruling was made on Thursday, 10 November. The court also dismissed suspended Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s application for leave to appeal, stating that it bore no reasonable prospects of success.
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Mkhwebane severely implicated both minister Gordhan and Deputy Commissioner Pillay in wrongdoing in her SARS’ High-Risk Investigations Unit report in July 2019.
Public apology
SARS has officially issued a public apology but SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter says that the apology was given much earlier and that the public statement just happened to ‘coincide’ with the court ruling.
“The two matters just happened to coincide. But this actually goes right back to when the Commission of Enquiry was led by Judge Nugent who made specific recommendations – one of the recommendations was that SARS should consider reviewing the matters of internal as well as external employees and in the case of external employees who were linked to the unfortunate incident of the investigative unit SARS actually outright commenced [with an apology].
“I appointed an independent panel led by professor Thuli Madonsela and appointed them to consider representation by employees who might have been affected and that initiated the process that resulted. Firstly, in us meeting on a number of occasions… [we] met with them physically and also virtually, it resulted in an individualised agreement that included certain aspects – financial and non-financial – including a personal apology. Yesterday was actually the conclusion of that process with the public apology.”
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SARS to make ammends
SARS issued an official statement that the allegations that a unit set up in 2008 to counter the illicit economy said to be established unlawfully was found to have no basis by the Nugent Commission.
This new finding was said to be supported by a number of important developments that have occurred over the past few years which were the Sunday Times reporting (that initially fuelled the false “rogue unit” narrative) retracting all their published reports and issuing an apologies for publishing the allegation; KPMG retracting the conclusions and recommendations of its report into the matter; the SARS Advisory Board chair, Judge Frank Kroon, retracting his findings regarding the unlawfulness of the establishment of the unit; the High Court setting aside the Inspector-General of Intelligence Report into the matter; and the High Court (Gauteng Division) in 2020 declaring unlawful and setting aside the Public Protector’s remedial action in her report dealing with the matter, which, amongst others, relied on the KPMG report, the Sikhakhane report and the report of the Inspector-General of Intelligence.
SARS has since paid “fair and reasonable” compensation for the infringement of personal rights and loss of employment of the individuals who implicated.
