CAPE TOWN, February 10 (ANA) – The Gupta family’s Oakbay had hounded Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan to use his political position to prevail on banks to re-open the company’s bank accounts, he contended in heads of argument in the case in which he is seeking a declaratory order that the law did not allow him to intervene in this manner.
“Indeed, it both inopportuned and badgered him,” the 50-page document filed to the Pretoria High Court and released by National Treasury on Friday stressed.
Gordhan’s lawyers deal extensively with Oakbay’s reason for opposing such an order, namely that there is no factual dispute as it had accepted that he was neither obliged nor allowed to intervene in the relationships between banks and their clients.
They say this is patently untrue, as evidenced by letters he received from the company between April and June last year.
“There can be no serious suggestion that the minister was not subjected to pressure both unprecedented and outside the law by the Gupta-controlled Oakbay companies to intervene.”
In its court papers Oakbay has indicated that it does not oppose the declaratory order sought by Gordon on the basis of legal principle but because he had been plotting politically against the company since last year.
Gordhan said the company’s correspondence make a mockery of its argument, as it did in fact seek his political assistance regarding the banks’ decision and while doing so over several months, never levelled such an accusation of conspiracy but in fact lauded his work in his current position and in the liberation struggle.
Oakbay, in their correspondence, had stressed that he was the political head of the economy, he noted.
“Politics were indeed already invoked in Oakbay’s first letter to the Minister, dated 8 April 2016.”
Gordhan’s court application has revealed that the Financial Intelligence Centre flagged 72 transactions by the Guptas’s business interests as suspect and seen him argue that the banks acted as they did because of the family’s political exposure.
The minister contends in the heads of arguments that the declaratory order is in the national interest and that the banks in question, FirstRand Bank, Nedbank, Standard Bank and Absa, support the application for a declaratory order for the sake of the integrity of South Africa’s financial sector.
Oakbay has argued that the order that Gordhan is seeking is abstract because the company indicated in April last year that it accepts that any law suit against the banks on its part would be “still born”.
But the minister argues that the company directly contradicted its own position by having threatened Standard Bank with legal action in April last year, on the same day it claimed to concede that it could not do so.
He adds that it was therefore impossible to rely on any of Oakbay’s factual versions of the events that followed the banks’ decision to close its accounts as they were irreconcilable.
“It underscores the need for declaratory relief to prevent Oakbay’s hedging between different versions of what it accepts to be the law.”
Argument is to be heard in court on March 28 and 29.
– African News Agency (ANA)
