If you’re looking for a rollicking conspiracy yarn to gird yourself for the invasion of the lizard-people, you’d do worse than to don a tinfoil hat and curl up with a litre of witblits and the 344-page affidavit filed by the Guptas’ lawyers this week.“Steps must be taken to clip the wings of this family,” Gordhan told the meeting, Ragavan says. Then, we find the axis upon which the conspiracy theory revolves. “All of a sudden”, she says, SA’s big companies began refusing to do business with the Guptas. The banks soon shuttered the family’s accounts, and others, like Barloworld, KPMG and ExecuJet, did their best to “drum up all the support they could to execute the instruction” given by Gordhan. “FNB, Nedbank and Standard Bank, aided by the SA Reserve Bank and at the behest of Gordhan, executed their instruction to clip the wings of the family.” Like any good conspiracy, the narrative leans heavily on the “what else could it be?” line of reasoning. So, Ragavan says: “It is fairly inc...

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