Appeals court turns down Gigaba plea
Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba has failed in his attempt to appeal against a court finding that he lied under oath in his legal battle with the Oppenheimer family.
Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba has failed in his attempt to appeal against a high court judgment, which found he had lied under oath in his legal battle with the Oppenheimer family.
The Supreme Court of Appeal on Wednesday dismissed Gigaba’s application for leave to appeal against the judgment, saying there was no reasonable prospect of success.
Judge Malcolm Wallis said in his judgment that “there is nothing to suggest that the issues raised by the minister are of such a nature as to warrant the grant of leave to appeal notwithstanding the lack of prospects of success”.
The application was dismissed with costs.
This was the fourth blow Gigaba suffered in the courts in relation to this matter.
The high court judgment, which was delivered in Pretoria in December 8 2017, found that the minister’s arguments in the matter were “disingenuous, spurious and fundamentally flawed, laboured and meritless, bad in law, astonishing, palpably untrue, untenable and not sustained by objective evidence, uncreditworthy and nonsensical”. An appeal was heard later that month and Gigaba lost again.
Judge Neil Tuchten found that Gigaba had “deliberately told untruths under oath” on facts that were central to the case.
Gigaba then approached the Supreme Court Appeal and the Constitutional Court concurrently. However, earlier in March, the Constitutional Court dismissed the application with costs, saying it was not in the interests of justice to hear the matter at that stage because the Supreme Court of Appeal had to rule on the matter first.
Now Gigaba has lost his application in the Supreme Court of Appeal.
Fireblade, the Oppenheimer’s aviation company, took Gigaba to court in 2016 after he rejected its application to operate a luxury international terminal at OR Tambo International Airport.
REVERSING APPROVAL
The Oppenheimers accused Gigaba of reversing his approval under pressure from the Gupta family, exerted through the former chairman of Denel, Daniel Mantsha.
Fireblade leases the terminal land from Denel.
The courts had relied on documents which showed Gigaba had originally granted permission to Fireblade.
The Supreme Court of Appeal found that Gigaba could not “rely on his own unlawful attempt to circumvent the decision he had lawfully made to grant Fireblade’s application”.
At the time of the first judgment Gigaba was finance minister, but when President Cyril Ramaphosa reshuffled the Cabinet he inherited from Zuma, Gigaba was moved back to the home affairs portfolio.