Magashule lawyer seeks answers on FBI probe

A US-based former personal assistant of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule has been contacted by the FBI ‘in respect of matters being investigated in SA’, giving further confirmation that law enforcement agencies are building a case against Magashule, says a City Press report. The alleged encounter between Moroadi Cholota and the FBI is recorded in a letter that the lawyers representing both Magashule and Cholota wrote to the Investigating Directorate (ID) of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) last weekend, raising the stakes in the face-off between Magashule and the NPA following media reports of alleged plans to arrest him. In the letter to Investigate Directorate head Advocate Hermione Cronje on 24 October, Victor Nkhwashu Attorneys claimed Cholota, a student in the US, was ‘particularly apprehensive to be visited by law enforcement authorities of that country purportedly/ostensibly on your instructions or request’. Cholota was Magashule’s assistant when he was Free State Premier and she identified businesspeople who could assist with funding for social responsibility programmes. She told the State Capture Commission in December last year that among the people she had requested funds from was the late Igo Mpambani, who was linked to the controversial asbestos scheme in the Free State, in which R200mn was spent without work being done. Nkhwashu urged Cronje to ‘confirm whether this is in fact true and, if not, on what basis the FBI would contact our client in respect of matters being investigated in SA, currently being investigated by your office’. He added: ‘Respectfully, the inference is inescapable that the visit by the FBI was at your request and/or at the request of someone under your authority. It is inconceivable that a foreign law enforcement agency would be investigating a domestic matter falling within the remit of your office.’

In her response, Cronje stated the NPA did not ‘disclose information regarding the identity of suspects in ongoing investigations’ and that it was focused on doing its work ‘scrupulously’. Nkhwashu, though, was not impressed, noting in the latest correspondence that Cronje’s response ‘gives our client little comfort’, adding that ‘it may, respectfully, be described as a total avoidance of engagement’. According to the City Press report, he said that as a public functionary exercising potentially invasive powers with regard to Magashule, the NPA was held to the highest standards of legality, ‘including taking responsibility for what clearly appears to be an orchestrated trial by media currently being conducted against our clients’. He requested assurance that neither Cronje nor anyone in her office was communicating with members of the media regarding the potential arrest of Magashule and that the NPA would not engage in such conduct, ‘given the serious violation of dignity that this has and will result in, made worse by the ongoing anxiety these "threats" of imminent arrest have caused to our client’.