Cape Town | Tuesday
A CITY of Cape Town programme, printed with a photo of Mayor Gerald Morkel enjoying a joke with fugitive businessman Jurgen Harksen, was an ”unfortunate mishap”, a city official said on Tuesday.
The programme was printed as the first of a series of mayoral ”meet the people” gatherings across the city, held in Goodwood on Monday.
Morkel only became aware of the politically embarrassing picture when he arrived at the venue, and city officials immediately made hurried attempts to withdraw the programme.
”The (incident) with the programme was an unfortunate mishap”, the head of the city’s communications division, Pieter Cronje, said on Tuesday.
He said that because it was uncertain last week whether the event would actually take place, the city’s in-house creative services section had been given the brief to produce the programme only on Thursday afternoon.
”It turned out to be a very rushed job,” he said.
The brief was commissioned by Morkel’s office manager Fritz Marx, but was instead signed off by another official in the mayor’s office, leaving the office’s creative services only two hours to print the programmes in time for the 11am function.
Part of the brief had been to include photographs showing the mayor with members of the public.
He said the photographs showed Harksen in an ”unfamiliar guise”, bearded and in a cap and t-shirt ”which is a little different from the clean-shaven and business-suited image that the media have carried”.
He said he had given Morkel a preliminary report on his investigations into the matter and would give a full report when the mayor arrived back in his office on Thursday from a local government conference he is attending in George.
Cronje said there would be a review of procedure to ensure that nothing like this happened again.
”At this stage we have not been able to identify any reason (other) than an unfortunate series of mistakes under time pressure.”
The incident could not have come at a worse time for Morkel.
Harksen is wanted in Germany on 65 charges of tax evasion and on fraud charges of R1-billion, and faces fraud charges in Cape Town involving between R70 and R100-million.
Morkel and his Democratic Alliance have rejected suggestions that they received donations from Harksen, but have conceded that their relationship with the German billionaire was ”inappropriate”.
The photograph was reportedly taken in December last year, at an Aids orphanage on the Cape Flats.
Morkel’s representative Kylie Hatton said on Tuesday that Morkel was happy with the explanation Cronje had given him so far, but would like further explanations when he returns from George.
Asked whether there was any indication at this stage of bad faith in the selection of the photographs, Hatton said: ”At this stage I’m suspicious but I haven’t seen any concrete proof of it”. – Sapa