Sam Sole Author
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/ 18 November 2005

Scopa hits out at Oilgate ‘irregularity’

Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) this week criticised Imvume Management and oil parastatal PetroSA over the Oilgate transaction that funded the African National Congress before last year’s elections. Scopa’s critique — the first official, public acknowledgement that the transaction was irregular — contradicted the National Assembly’s adoption a day earlier of Public Protector Lawrence Mushwana’s report on Oilgate.

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/ 18 November 2005

Cops, NIA sucked into Zuma ‘rape’ war

Rape allegations against African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma appear to have been deliberately leaked in a bid to increase the pressure on Zuma ahead of this weekend’s crucial ANC national executive committee meeting. However, no evidence has come to light to suggest the allegations themselves were manufactured. Zuma, through his attorney, has categorically denied the charge.

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/ 21 October 2005

Axe hangs over spy chiefs

Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils has moved to suspend National Intelligence Agency boss Billy Masetlha and two of his most senior managers, as the bitter succession battle in the African National Congress reaches into the highest levels of the country’s security apparatus. Masetlha, head of operations Gibson Njenje and counter-intelligence chief Bob Mhlanga received letters from Kasrils on Monday asking them to give reasons why they should not be fired.

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/ 23 September 2005

Imvume escapes the heat

While the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> is under active police investigation, the subject of its exposés, Oilgate company Imvume Management, has suffered no similar misfortune. In late July and early August, the Freedom Front Plus and the Democratic Alliance tried to have criminal investigations initiated into Imvume.

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/ 16 September 2005

PetroSA: We should have …

PetroSA, the state-owned enterprise at the centre of the Oilgate scandal, admitted to the auditor general that it should have conducted a due diligence investigation before advancing R15-million to Imvume Management in December 2003.
As the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> revealed earlier this year, Imvume passed on R11-million of the advance to the African National Congress, which was suffering a cash-crunch at the time.

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/ 8 September 2005

Oilgate: the global setting

The most authoritative report yet on the $100-billion Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme describes a litany of abuses, including how Saddam Hussein’s regime bestowed lucrative oil allocations to buy international support. This is consistent with <i>Mail & Guardian</i>’s exposés on Oilgate company Imvume Management and its boss, Sandi Majali.

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/ 12 August 2005

Mushwana takes more flak

In a development that raises further concern over the conduct of Public Protector Lawrence Mushwana, the Mail & Guardian has established that Mushwana personally intervened to remove a politically sensitive investigation from his Cape Town office. His subsequent report declined to investigate most allegations and took others no further.