While the Bankorp scandal dates back to the early ’90s, there could not have been a more fraught moment than right now for this skeleton to be dragged out of the cupboard. The key protagonists in the drama – Trevor Manuel, Tito Mboweni, Maria Ramos, Thabo Mbeki — in positions of government authority at the time, are those who now stand accused by President Jacob Zuma’s backers of having banded together to protect white monopoly capitalism and its crooked apartheid beneficiaries.Also implicated by the CIEX report is the Rupert family, which the report erroneously states were involved in organising the lifeboat. The Ruperts were not in invested in Bankorp and were in competition with it. An array of political groupings from the Gupta family and Oakbay executives, to Andile Mngxitama’s Black Land First and the "paid-Twitter" Zuma acolytes have in recent months energetically popularised the CIEX report on social media that urged the government to recover, among other apartheid debts, th...

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