The North Gauteng High Court has ordered that the Public Protector’s report into alleged state capture should be released no later then 5pm on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
This follows an interesting morning in court, which kicked off with lawyers representing president Jacob Zuma announcing they would be withdrawing the application to block the report’s publishing.<\/p>\n
Three judges of the High Court ordered that the report should be published on the Public Protector’s website no later than 5pm on Wednesday – and added that the president had seven days to\u00a0submit heads of argument on why he shouldn’t the pay costs of the case in his personal capacity.<\/p>\n
Zuma, along with cooperative governance minister, Des van Rooyen, and mining minister\u00a0Mosebenzi Zwane brought an application to block Madonsela\u2019s report into allegations of state capture.<\/p>\n
The basis for the president\u2019s case was that, as an implicated person in the investigation, he was not granted a fair opportunity to have his say on allegations of state capture, or to cross-examine witnesses who have made allegations against him.<\/p>\n
Similar grounds were mentioned by van Rooyen and Zwane.<\/p>\n
According to Zuma\u2019s lawyers, the interdict was not seeking to ban the report, but rather to grant the president a period of two months to have his say in response to the allegations contained within the report.<\/p>\n
Van Rooyen\u2019s application was to be heard with Zuma\u2019s, but because of its late entry into the matter \u2013 and van Rooyen\u2019s legal team being unprepared \u2013 it was struck off the roll as not being urgent.<\/p>\n
Van Rooyen wanted all references to him in the report, to be redacted.<\/p>\n
Zwane\u2019s application accused Madonsela of having an ulterior motive in producing the report, which implicates him in a number of dubious activities relating to the Gupta family and its businesses.<\/p>\n
The mining minister wants the report to be barred from being published, and set aside completely.<\/p>\n
Zuma doesn\u2019t want to ban the state capture report \u2013 he just wants 2 months to respond<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Van Rooyen makes second attempt to block state capture report<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n