PUBLIC PROTECTOR’S BANKORP ANALYSIS
Report’s problems more than semantics
Basic error in the Bankorp ‘lifeboat’ saga report flags poisonous politics and poor understanding, writes Hilary Joffe
Anyone can make a simple grammatical error. But when a report that probes complex financial structures can’t seem to tell the difference between "borrowed" and "lent", you have to wonder about its accuracy, pedantic as this might be. The title of the public protector’s leaked provisional report on the decades-old Bankorp "lifeboat" saga speaks of the government’s alleged failure to recover funds "borrowed" to Absa. But the grammatical error pales in comparison with the inaccurate picture it paints of the financial and legal technicalities of the lifeboat itself. In a way, the technicalities are less the issue than the politics of the leaked report, which has fed, surely not coincidentally, into a Gupta-inspired narrative about "white monopoly capital" and how the Treasury and the Reserve Bank are supposedly shielding the likes of Absa, which bought Bankorp way back in 1992.It’s hard to disentangle the poisonous politics around the report from simple sloppiness or inadequate understa...
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