Guptas drove graft – Manyi

Speaking on a panel at Daily Maverick’s annual conference, The Gathering, yesterday, purchaser of the Gupta media outlets Mzwanele Manyi told host Ferial Haffajee that the Guptas had driven corruption in South Africa.

“If you put a bottle of milk near the Guptas, it will turn sour,” he said.

Manyi was the owner of Afro Voice newspaper, formerly The New Age, which recently filed for liquidation. He also owns DStv channel Afro Worldview, which was called ANN7 when the Guptas owned it. Its contract expires on August 20 and MultiChoice has said they did not plan to renew it.

Manyi tweeted on Monday that there was a “very well orchestrated attempt to “sabotage” the channel and that the “evidence is overwhelming”. According to him, “various known sources put out fictitious information to unsettle the organisation and to work on society to accept our manufactured demise”.

The Guptas started both outlets to establish a source of news sympathetic to themselves and then president Jacob Zuma. When Zuma’s presidency abruptly ended, they fled to Dubai, selling the media operations to Manyi in a “vendor financing” deal.

While Manyi had allegedly been close to the Guptas, he subsequently attempted to distance himself and his media outlets from the controversial family, later blaming the negative publicity surrounding Zuma and the Guptas for his newspaper’s failure.

He was attempting to distance himself and his company, Afrotone Media, from them in order to win an individual commercial free-to-air television broadcasting service and radio frequency spectrum licence as two organisations had called on the Independent Communications Authority of SA not to grant the licence. – ANA