National Busisiwe Mkhwebane to fight legal costs order BL PREMIUM

Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane is not giving up her fight to overturn the estimated R900,000 legal bill she was ordered to pay after her disastrous court battle with the Reserve Bank. She has now turned to both the Supreme Court of Appeal and the Constitutional Court to fight that costs order, which was the first of its kind to be made against a public protector. The High Court in Pretoria ordered that Mkhwebane personally pay 15% of the Reserve Bank’s legal costs in its successful challenge to her report on the apartheid-era bail-out given to Bankorp. Bankorp was later taken over by Absa. Mkhwebane had been forced to admit she had got it wrong when she ordered that the Reserve Bank’s constitutional mandate must be changed. But she continued to defend the overall validity of her report. In that report, Mkhwebane ordered the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) to reopen an earlier investigation by the unit into the apartheid-era lifeboat granted to Bankorp "in order to recover misa...