I attended Stephan Hofstatter’s book launch Licence to Loot last week. We were quite a crowd, including protesters against the Sunday Times’s spurious "Sars rogue unit" and "Cato Ridge murder squads" stories. Hofstatter, Mzilikazi wa Afrika and Piet Rampedi were some of the journalists who wrote the stories, and the editor of Sunday Times at that time was Phylicia Oppelt. The first part of the launch turned into something of a truth and reconciliation session — without much reconciliation — with former SA Revenue Service (Sars) risk specialist Peter Richer outlining how his life and reputation were mostly destroyed by the Sunday Times stories and describing similar consequences for others such as Ivan Pillay and Johan van Loggerenberg; and Johan Booysen with the Cato Ridge saga. The response from Hofstatter was, to my mind, inadequate. Though he expressed regret, he came across as unbowed by the enormity of his actions and those of his fellow journalists. He said he was "not ready" ...
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