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Success demands effort, but specifically effort expended on the right ventures for the right reasons this is worth remembering when times are hard, such as when I blew the whistle on my employer for withholding information relevant to the state capture enquiry
Bain, the US-based management consultancy firm, is facing renewed pressure to come clean about the full extent of its role in bringing the SA Revenue Service (SARS) to its knees during the corrosive State Capture years.
Calls for Bain to play open cards have come over the past two years from senior government officials including Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan, who once headed SARS, and National Treasury deputy director-general for tax and financial sector policy Ismail Momoniat.
But now Athol Williams, a former Bain partner, has accused the firm of silencing him from speaking about its work to allegedly ransack and destroy SARS under former commissioner Tom Moyane. This is because Bain launched an application at the State Capture Commission on 23 November 2020 to have half of Williams’s 700-page affidavit and annexures blocked from going public. Bain has also applied to cross-examine Williams on his evidence.
Dear Justice Zondo,
We the undersigned organisations, whistle-blowers and human rights activists, co-ordinated by Open Secrets, write to you as the Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, Corruption and Fraud enters its important final phase of work. We write to you today concerning a glaring gap in your work to date: framing the accountability of those corporations complicit in State Capture. There is an urgent need to call corporations to provide detailed evidence of their alleged complicity in State Capture to the commission.
We recognise that the commission is under significant pressure and believe that recent legal steps taken by the commission to compel former president Jacob Zuma to appear in a public forum to account before the commission is to be lauded and is a step in the right direction. However, impunity thrives on a culture of silence and inaction. We believe that it is important to remind individuals such as Zuma that we are all equal before the law