Rehana Rossouw
THE law requiring members of Parliament to declare their assets and financial interests and extra-parliamentary income may be well-meaning but it is nearly impossible to uphold, according to the person responsible for administering the register.
Acting registrar of members’ interests, Peter Lilienfeld, said that without funds to hire investigators to check out MPs’ disclosure statements, he has had no option but to trust that MPs will disclose their financial interests. Lilienfeld also called on the public to report inaccuracies in their MPs’ statements to Parliament.
The M&G discovered some discrepancies in the information supplied by an MP in May last year, but was unable to determine whether the missing information had been deliberately withheld or disclosed confidentially.
The Register of Members’ Interests has three sections: one for public disclosure, one dealing with employment outside Parliament and a confidential section.
So while some MPs have listed their properties – some even gave addresses – in the public section of the register, others appear to have chosen to list them confidentially.
For example, the M&G ascertained last September that NP MP Abe Williams owned 11 properties in the Western Cape. He listed three in the public register.
Lilienfeld said it was possible that Williams had listed the remaining eight properties in the confidential section of the register, but he was not at liberty to confirm this. The same could go for African National Congress MP Winnie Mandela, who was named in court by a bank as the bond- holder for a property in Soweto that she did not disclose in the part of the register available to the public.
`The confidential part of the register is only open to myself and the parliamentary committee on members’ interests,” he said.
“The code can be reviewed and changed … It has to be seen as a massive first step. I cannot go out and investigate whether a person has more properties than has been disclosed unless I receive a complaint from the public.”
Lilienfeld said he had noted the disclosure by Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu that he held shares in a publishing company that produces educational material, but would not take further steps.
“He complied with the code by declaring that he owned the shares. He will only be required to cede ownership if someone complains. It is not up to the registrar to be pro-active and search in advance for conflicts of interests,” he said.
“The whole system is based on good faith, not on the registrar releasing information about members of Parliament to the public.”
MPs are required to list all gifts in the public section of the register. Although only two MPs had disclosed that they had been given cellphones as gifts, the M&G has ascertained that at least eight more have received them.
l The M&G reported last week that deputy speaker Baleka Kgotsitsile listed the total value of her gifts, including a Technics CD player, at less than R350. She pointed out this week that what she had said in her statement was that none of the individual gifts was valued at more than R350.