Where are the state capture prosecutions?
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) has asked National Director of Public Prosecutions Advocate Shamila Batoyi for a meeting to discuss the slow pace of prosecution of state capture culprits by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).
“Since your appointment in 2019, we were acutely aware that the NPA was addressing capacity challenges and other barriers in order to ‘restart the engines’. For this reason, through our communications and media structures, OUTA sought to placate the public’s impatience and expectations of the NPA,” wrote Wayne Duvenage, OUTA CEO, in a letter to Batoyi.
“However, over the past year our patience has begun to wear thin. We have found ourselves unable to defend the inaction of the criminal justice system, especially when it came to many apparent ‘solid cases’ which have languished or become dormant with very little meaningful advancement to date.”
A month ago Duvenage wrote a similar letter to Advocate Hermione Cronje, the head of the NPA’s Investigating Directorate whose resignation was recently announced, but did not receive a reply.
In his letter to Batoyi, Duvenage acknowledged that she had taken over a “broken institution” in April 2019, and OUTA had been supportive of this, providing input and assistance to the NPA. In addition, OUTA has referred a number of matters of suspicious criminal activities to the NPA in terms of section 27 of the NPA Act.
More information
A soundclip with comment by Wayne Duvenage is here.
Duvenage’s letter to Advocate Batoyi is here.