ROB ROSE: Rand rigging: net closes
SA’s banks have sought to paint the competition probe into rand rigging as dead in the water. New affidavits show this is far from the case
If the banks thought that Tembinkosi Bonakele, the bespectacled competition commissioner, was going to be scared off by a squadron of jargon-wielding legal eagles, they seriously underestimated the studious MBA graduate. Bonakele was a lawyer with Joburg-based Cheadle Thompson & Haysom before he joined the commission in 2007. So when, last February, he accused 18 banks of conspiring to rig the rand, he knew they’d lawyer-up and seize on every technicality. Which is precisely what they did. Only, to hear them tell it, it was as if Bonakele’s team had whimsically filed charges in a senior moment of regulatory overreach, after a hard night on the tequila. The accusations are "vague and embarrassing" the lawyers cried (lawyer-talk for "short on detail"), and the competition commission doesn’t have the jurisdiction to bring this case against the traders anyway.
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