Last month the Mail & Guardian reported how Goodson, a member of the bank’s board since 2003, held extremist views on Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.
”Goodson … holds contentious views that include admiring the economic policies pursued by Hitler in Nazi Germany, a belief that international bankers financed and manipulated the war against Hitler because they saw his model of state capitalism as a threat to their usurious ways and that the Holocaust was a fiction invented to extract vast amounts of compensation from the defeated Germans,” the M&G reported.
In an interview with American journalist Deanna Spingola broadcast on the Republic Broadcasting Network, Goodson described the Holocaust as ”a huge lie”.
Holocaust denial is a crime in many countries across the world.
Internal matter
When approached by the M&G for comment about his resignation, Goodson explained that, in terms of Section 33 of the South African Reserve Bank Act, he was unable to comment on any internal matter regarding the bank.
”I can only state that my resignation was initiated by me and was entirely voluntary and that I have been compensated as if I had been a director until my term expired on July 27 2012,” he said.
Hlengani Mathebula, the bank’s head of group strategy and communication, said it had nothing more to add to its statement on Goodson’s resignation, which consisted of one sentence.
David Jacobson, executive director of the Jewish Board of Deputies in Cape Town, said ”no specific pressure” had been placed on the Reserve Bank to have Goodson removed.
”I think the correct outcome has emerged and sanity has prevailed,” he said.
International pressure
The chairperson of the South Africa Israel Public Affairs Committee, David Hersch, said he believed it was international pressure that had led to Goodson’s resignation.
The M&G article, Hersch said, was picked up by the Jerusalem Post – Israel’s bestselling daily and most-read English website – and subsequently became big news in Israel. It appeared in many mediums and even featured as a topic of a televised talk show.
In its article, the Jerusalem Post said members of the Jewish community emphasised that although they identified with the call to fire Goodson, they understood that legally the Reserve Bank could not do so, because he was serving as a non-executive director representing the bank’s shareholders and was not employed by the bank.
”It did not make the Reserve Bank look good,” Hersch said, ”and it is that pressure from overseas which brought this moral suasion on the bank.”
