How a bit of everyday jobs-for-pals recruitment corruption by then-Legal Aid South Africa ('LASA') Board chairperson Dunstan Mlambo JP in favour of a former judicial colleague, a long-time, repeatedly appointed acting judge of the Labour Court, went very badly wrong, beginning with the usual stonewalling to obstruct an enquiry into it, and then, under rising pressure to account, escalated from brazen lies to the commission of multiple crimes and other unlawful and unconstitutional misconduct, in the standard multiplying dynamic of a disintegrating cover-up, more specifically:

• multiple criminal and other illegal contraventions of the Public Finance Management Act ('PFMA') committed repeatedly over a decade, involving millions of rands of unlawful expenditure every year, and the blocking of budgeted and funded constitutional- and other complex litigation services to the indigent, which particular specialist service delivery the National Assembly has stated it's specifically concerned to see;

• persistent illegal and unconstitutional refusal of access to public records duly requested under the Promotion of Access to Information Act ('PAIA') to obstruct an investigation of this corruption; and then repeated false annual reporting to the South African Human Rights Commission ('SAHRC') to conceal from the Justice Portfolio Committee of the National Assembly this corruptly-motivated, contemptuous non-compliance with LASA's constitutional information transparency obligations, and to thereby evade being held to account for it;

• other lying to the SAHRC on multiple scores to mislead and defraud it and thereby pervert its investigation of a complaint about LASA's illegal and unconstitutional suppression of records duly requested under PAIA;

• lying and false reporting to the Justice Minister and to the Justice Portfolio Committee to mislead and defraud them and thereby pervert the special enquiries they separately and independently instituted into recruitment corruption at LASA and into its executives' repeated illegal and unconstitutional refusals to respond to PAIA requests duly made during an investigation of this;

• other false reporting to mislead and defraud the Portfolio Committee and thereby prevent it from carrying out its constitutional oversight function over LASA, in which false reporting on other occasions the latter's national management executives told the Committee completely different, contradictory lies to cover up recruitment corruption and to pervert the Committee's insistent demands for an explanation concerning their 'non-cooperation' with requests for information made under PAIA, reported to it by the SAHRC;

• false reporting by LASA's national management executive to the Board, telling it a bunch of new lies (whenever their lips move), radically contradicting the totally different lies earlier told to the Minister and to the Portfolio Committee – new mutually exclusive and destructive lies told to mislead and defraud the Board so as to cover up recruitment corruption and to distract from their illegal unauthorised, radical deviation from LASA's Strategic Plan drawn under the PFMA, approved by the Board, and presented to the Minister and Portfolio Committee;

• contradictory perjury and subornation of perjury committed repeatedly prior to and in legal proceedings to cover up recruitment corruption; and even,

• corruption of the judiciary, by dint of an anonymous, unsigned, undated, unstamped 'memorandum' slipped (by some obviously well-connected, highly-motivated, top LASA officer) to a judge of appeal, Waglay JP (Mlambo JP's successor as head of the Labour- and Labour Appeal Courts, and previously his long-time Deputy JP), importuning him to throw a case LASA's way;

– with Mlambo JP at the centre of it all, a non-executive Board member at the time, openly intruding himself into and illegally interfering with executive management's recruitment operations and decisions to benefit his unqualified and disqualified friends (as if he owned the place, like the family supermarket), and then covering it up, first by conniving at and colluding in (four times) the illegal and unconstitutional suppression of duly requested incriminating documents, and then by telling a profusion of greasy lies to the Minister and to the Portfolio Committee (after being exposed, one criminal lie recanted under oath, another criminal lie dropped and substituted with other lies, then revived), loyally aided and abetted in these crimes and other capital misconduct by LASA's top national management executives and in-house attorneys, then-Chief Legal Executive Patrick Hundermark, then-National Operations Executive Brian Nair, and then-CEO Vidhu Vedalankar, and by a cowed, supine and useless Board, including the Justice Department's Pieter du Rand, who – like then-CFO Rebecca Hlabatau and then-COO Jerry Makokoane, also informed – looked the other way, both in breach of his fiduciary duty to LASA as a Board director and in dereliction of his watching brief from the Department as its representative on the Board.

CONTACT
Anthony Brink
Advocate of the High Court of South Africa
Former Magistrate of the District, Civil, and Regional Courts
anthonybrink.sa (at) gmail.com
083 779 4174

'[The evidence given by its executives] proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... [It] is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law ... It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing.' – Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, remarking on the egregious dishonesty of Microsoft's executives displayed in United States v. Microsoft Corp., 97 F.Supp.2d 59. (D.D.C. 2000). As the documents posted on this website show, these observations apply remarkably appositely to the similar culture of unstinting brazen mendacity in LASA's top ranks, with former chairperson Dunstan Mlambo JP setting the example for LASA's national management executives.

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