A Wellington lawyer has gone to court to challenge Chief Justice Raymond Zondo’s state-capture report.
Duncan Korabie says the commission made false adverse findings against him in the fourth state-capture report, without notifying him or giving him an opportunity to respond.
“I am now being branded as a Gupta associate and a beneficiary of state capture . . . This situation has become unbearable for me,” he said in an affidavit.
Korabie has urgently appealed the Western Cape High Court to review the adverse findings about him in the report, released in April, and order the commission and Zondo to correct them.
The findings against him were “so fundamentally flawed as having resulted in a complete failure of justice,” he said.
Korabie is an attorney for the Richtersveld Sida !Hub Communal Property Association which, from 2013, has had an increasingly fraught relationship with state diamond company Alexkor.
After the Richtersveld community’s successful claim the community partnered with the company over the mineral rights, but in his affidavit Korabie said he represented the property association in a number of subsequent legal battles.
The state-capture report dealt with an allegedly illegal tender to market and sell diamonds, which was awarded by the joint venture between Alexkor and community-owned Richtersveld Mining Company to Scarlet Sky Investments 60, which had no diamond licence, which alone should have disqualified its bid, said the report, and no track record in the industry.
The report found evidence of links between Scarlet Sky and the Guptas.
Moreover, Scarlet Sky allegedly sold the mineral below market value to the detriment of the state, but also to that of a previously disadvantaged Northern Cape community.
The Zondo report recommended that members of the Alexkor tender committee, including Korabie, should be investigated by Alexkor and the Pool Sharing Joint Venture for allegedly being in breach of their fiduciary duties.
The commission recommended that law-enforcement agencies conduct further investigations with a view to the possible prosecution of, among others, Korabie for fraud or a contravention of the Companies Act by deliberately making a misrepresentation regarding SSl’s compliance with the tender requirements.
In his affidavit, which has been lodged with the Western Cape High Court in Cape Town, Korabie denies any wrongdoing, and says he had previously communicated with the commission his full cooperation with any investigations, and was also willing to testify before the commission.
“The chairperson failed to follow the rules of the commission by not notifying me that I was regarded as an implicated party,” he said.
This was one of nine reasons Korabie gave for why the commission’s reasoning was flawed. He also said during the hearing of evidence Zondo had mentioned it was important to get an affidavit from him.
“If this were done the true state of affairs would have been disclosed,” he said.
The case will be heard on 19 July.
