Key Takeaways
- From 2015-2021, the ANC chief financial officer and a Swazi diplomat previously attached to the ANC’s investment arm were seemingly involved in a R200-million scheme that channelled money to a church in Eswatini.
- Internal bank investigations traced some of these funds to the ANC’s election fund account.
- Financial intelligence documents leaked in a cross border investigative partnership with the International Consortium of investigative Journalists have exposed how the party blamed for so much corruption in SA is possibly also a victim.
This story is based on a cache of leaked documents from the Eswatini Financial Intelligence Unit. The documents comprise more than 890,000 internal records from the Eswatini Financial Intelligence Unit (EFIU) obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit devoted to publishing and archiving leaks, which shared them with ICIJ. ICIJ coordinated a team of 38 journalists from 11 countries – including amaBhungane – to investigate illicit or suspicious financial flows in southern Africa and beyond.
Part One: South Africa and the ANC moneymen
On a balmy evening in June 2015, four men with deep Swazi connections were preparing to take on the night in Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur.
It had been a year since Sibusisiwe Mngomezulu was posted at the Eswatini High Commission in Kuala Lumpur as a counsellor and, as evidenced by the picture of the group posted by his friend Musa Sibandze, he was taking a break from his diplomatic duties.
The blurry photo shows the men in clumsy poses behind a kitchen island covered with an assortment of half-empty liquor bottles and mixers.
The ANC, the megachurch and the mystery of the R200-million money flows
