‘McBride trying to save face with new application’

Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) head Robert McBride is trying to save face with a new urgent application to remove investigators from a probe into the police watchdog.

This is according to former acting National Police Commissioner Khomotso Phahlane.

Until recently, Phahlane faced a charge of defeating the ends of justice, after being accused of interfering with a probe into allegations of fraud against him.

In a recent application, McBride seeks to have police investigators – whom he said were currently being investigated by Ipid – removed from the investigation into the conduct of Ipid investigators.

But Phahlane claimed that McBride’s latest application was an attempt to avoid having to follow through on a previous application in which he alleges that it was Phahlane who assembled a team of investigators to conduct a “counter-investigation” into Ipid officers who were probing allegations of corruption against Phahlane.

In the new application McBride says he did not seek to stop SAPS from investigating his team, but wanted a court order to remove the current investigators from that case, saying they were compromised as they were being investigated by Ipid.

In McBride's latest application, Phahlane is the 7th respondent. Phahlane's replying affidavit is rife with sarcastic jibes at McBride and private investigator Paul O’Sullivan.

“The effect of the interim order if granted will be to neutralise the main application while the applicant continues to drag its heels and fails to prosecute the application to finality,” he says. “Under the circumstances, the present application constitutes an abuse of the process of court as it seeks urgent relief in the context of the applicant in the main application having failed to prosecute its application to fruition; and in the absence of any adequate explanation for that failure.”

He adds that the SAPS investigation into Ipid officers, which he insists he did not request himself, would reveal how O’Sullivan had “captured” Ipid.

O’Sullivan said yesterday that Phahlane was consistently at odds with the truth, but evidence against him continued to pile on. “I just happen to know that on Thursday and Friday last week, a raid took place at a warehouse in Silverton, owned by the police. The raid uncovered millions of rand in forensic supplies, bought by Phahlane and his accomplices, all of it past the sell-by-date. If I was him, I would exercise my constitutional right to remain silent, because every time he opens his mouth... he simply provides more evidence of his corrupt conduct.”