BRUCE'S LIST: Sticking to the script: The Hawks clear the Guptas

Bruce’s List: A guide to informed reads.

The nice man who runs the Hawks, SA’s supposed priority crimes unit, seems to have written a soothing letter to the Gupta family assuring them that in no way are they being investigated for anything. Gen Berning Ntlemeza wrote the letter last week, so the Guptas were able to include it in their affidavit opposing finance minister Pravin Gordhan’s appeal to the courts that the Guptas be prevented from pestering him to get the country’s big banks to start doing business with them again. Gordhan, in seeking a declaration from the court, supplied it with a list of transactions totalling nearly R7bn by Gupta companies which treasury’s Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) had flagged as suspicious.

The story is interesting because the transactions listed by Gordhan may have looked suspicious to the FIC but they may also have been legitimate. As the issue at hand is ultimately the closure last year by all the country’s major banks of their Gupta accounts, the issue of whether or not the Guptas are crooked or nearly crooked can really only be cleared up by the banks and not by Gordhan. Yet under the guise of not being able to discuss individual clients the banks are having their cake and eating it. It is treasury that is having to stand up for them. It would take the banks a few minutes to detail the Gupta transactions they were involved with.

As it is, the banks themselves are on a precipice, as the Zuma/Gupta/Essa axis holds up the passage of the Financial Intelligence Centre Amendment Act (Fica). The bill is designed to strengthen SA’s anti-money laundering and terrorism-financing arsenal. It passed easily through parliament but Zuma sat on it and sent it back because it allows for searches of private homes without a warrant.

Well, that’s a dead giveaway. The president and his cronies have things to hide and they don’t want any surprise visits, thank you very much. Tomorrow the finance committee in parliament holds a hearing on the bits of Fica that Zuma wants changed and there are some heavyweights on both sides of the issue. The banks are nervous because the longer it takes to align our financial intelligence legislation with the developed world, the greater the chances are that our banks could be excluded from the global banking system. In other words, the time may come when you order something from Canada and try to pay for it but the receiving bank in Canada will refuse to accept your payment because it emanates from SA.

Both these stories are important. They are both about making or breaking the hold the Gupta family has on the state and on the president. They’re both in Business Day today. The first lists many of the charges laid against the Guptas but obviously ignored by the Hawks. The big one the story misses is the charge under the Corrupt Practices Act which David Maynier of the DA laid after the deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas declared that the Guptas had offered him the finance minister’s job in 2015. It really is shocking.

And here is the line-up for parliament and the Fica bill tomorrow.

And, ultimately, this is what corruption on a Biblical scale, and poor policy and general neglect under Zuma since he assumed power in 2009, has brought us to. Tax increases. Big ones too. That’s because the country doesn’t have the money to pay for Zuma’s poor policies and his pitiful leadership. Hilary Joffe always hits the nail on the head.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Prime Minister Theresa May has had her first glimpse of the limits of political power in a democracy. The supreme court has ruled that she cannot just go ahead and start the Brexit process without first winning support for it in the House of Commons. What will they think of next? Leaving the European Union is an exceedingly foolish thing to do and at least the courts have given the British another opportunity to rethink their position, or their future.

But outside SA, it is the Trump presidency in the US, now halfway though its first week, that is the only really serious opposition to Zuma and his pals. Donald Trump, this “preening narcissist” as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter calls him in the final piece, simply cannot ignore the noise and do his job. That is because he has clear mental health problems. Here’s The New York Times on Trump’s first meeting with Republican and Democratic congressmen and senators. The subject? The size of the crowd at his inauguration.

And here is Carter, arguably, along with New Yorker editor David Remnick, the finest editor in America today, on his new president, as he spends his first week signing executive orders to expel immigrants, build a wall along the Mexican border, repeal health insurance for the poor and remove US funding to birth control programmes in the developing world. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.