By: Adv Anthony Brink
Mlambo JP faces impeachment and imprisonment on eight counts of capital misconduct, including crimes, charged in finely detailed, documented complaints filed against him in mid-2017, currently pending (on appeal) before the Judicial Conduct Committee (‘JCC’) of the Judicial Service Commission (‘JSC’). The case documents are accessible at illegal-aid.co.za/JSC/Mlambo_JP.
Should you appoint him Chief Justice, the damage to local and international confidence in the integrity of our country’s judiciary, and for our country’s international standing generally, will likely be extreme when this scandal blows; and the cat’s already out the bag:
Hlophe JP pertinently mentions my complaints against Mlambo JP in paragraph 49.7 of his founding affidavit supporting his pending review application to set aside the findings of the JCC tribunal against him, upheld by Mlambo JP and the rest of the JSC majority. Hlophe JP’s affidavit is hyperlinked to my note about his impeachment case, posted at illegal-aid.co.za/JSC/Hlophe_JP.
My note irons out some inaccuracies in Hlophe JP’s affidavit regarding my complaints, so I’ve shared it with him directly, as well as with his legal representatives, to ensure that the actual substance of my extraordinarily serious complaints against Mlambo JP can be correctly conveyed in Hlophe JP’s supplementary affidavit, to be drawn and filed once he has the record of proceedings at which Mlambo JP and the rest of the JSC majority condemned him to be impeached.
Former President Jacob Zuma is also full well aware of my eight complaints against Mlambo JP, because I described them to him at a 30-minute private meeting at his house at Nkandla on 22 February 2021 at 9 pm, held at his request for a briefing on the content of my complaints, after he’d learned of them from a third party. I promptly reported our meeting to the Chief Justice; see my second letter to him, posted at illegal-aid.co.za/JSC/Mogoeng_CJ.
I’m in regular email, text, and telephone contact with a silk on the former President’s legal team, and he’s fully au fait with my complaints, all of which charge Mlambo JP with hanging offences for which he is liable to be removed from the bench and jailed.
Since the former President told me with palpable bitterness that he regards Mlambo JP as an unprincipled and unscrupulous political hack, absolutely prejudiced against him, there’s a fair chance he’ll be raising Mlambo JP’s gross misconduct, detailed and vouched in my complaints, sometime in the future.
Certainly, the former President isn’t down and out; he’s just filed a supplementary affidavit in his review application regarding the appointment of Zondo DCJ to the State Capture Commission and his refusal to recuse himself. The former President’s affidavit is hyperlinked to my note on his contempt case, in which Mlambo JP prominently features, at illegal-aid.co.za/ZUMA.
Following exactly the dismal example set for him by his brother in the Supreme Court of Appeal, Seriti JA (ret.), who notoriously gave the profoundly corrupt Arms Deal a fake clean bill, later set aside by Mlambo JP on review, Zondi JA pulled the same stunt on 8 July 2021 by equally falsely dissembling that my eight squarely documented, minutely particularised impeachable complaints against Mlambo JP were idle.
Zondi JA’s risible, disgraceful dismissal of my complaints, for which he’ll be charged before the JCC for his abysmal dereliction of his office like Seriti JA was, is picked to pieces in my very extensive notice of appeal, currently pending decision; see illegal-aid.co.za/JSC/Mlambo_JP.
As I state in my appeal notice, for much the same reasons that Mlambo JP set aside Seriti JA’s discreditably false and indefensible Arms Deal report, Zondi JA’s discreditably false and indefensible dismissal of my heavy complaints against Mlambo JP likewise falls to be set aside on any honest and intelligent appraisal of the irrefragably substantiated facts.
Consequently, like Mlambo JP’s career as a judge, the local and international reputation of the South African judiciary is seriously exposed right now; and were you appoint him Chief Justice in the teeth of the documented facts now before you of his brazen criminal and other gross misconduct, in which he’s repeatedly demonstrated his perfect contempt for the Constitution, the law, and the truth, also his total lack of any personal ethics (see below), the consequences for our country are likely to be very serious indeed.
To alert you to the scale and extent of the judicial corruption you’re faced with in this matter: not only did the JCC corruptly close ranks around Mlambo JP as a ranking member of the JSC to protect him from being held to account and impeached and jailed for his crimes and other capital misconduct, email records recently turned up in response to a broadly framed PAIA request filed with the Society of Advocates of KwaZulu-Natal show also that the JSC repeatedly worked behind the scenes to get me struck off the roll of advocates – for allegedly disgracefully unprofessionally indicting Mlambo JP’s gross misconduct in my eight affirmed, comprehensively documented complaints, duly filed with the JCC under section 14 of the JSC Act.
So crass is the bias of Mlambo JP’s fellows on the JSC in his favour and against me and my complaints that one or more of them asked the Society of Advocates, via the JSC’s then-secretary, the late Lynette Bios, to apply for my strike-off – many months before the JCC had even sought Mlambo JP’s response to my complaints. Several months later, after he finally responded, pathetically dishonestly and in an outrageous manner hugely aggravating my charges, the JSC again approached the Society to ask it how it was getting on with applying for my strike-off – years before my complaints had even been decided and found to be good or bad. (They were only decided after my repeated nagging of JSC members Mogoeng CJ and Zondo DCJ by way of four letters I wrote to them, pleading for the JCC to quit dragging anchor and to finally determine my scandalously long-unresolved complaints. The letters are posted at illegal-aid.co.za/JSC.) The stunning email records of the JSC’s repeated moves to get me struck off for duly complaining of Mlambo JP’s criminal and other gross misconduct are accessible at illegal-aid.co.za/LPC.
In short, the JSC corruptly moved to protect one of its fellows by trying to arrange the professional assassination of the witness against him, like criminal gangsters contracting for a hit to be carried out against a trial witness.
A PAIA request addressed to the JSC two weeks ago may expose the identity of those on the JSC who tried rubbing me out as a witness to Mlambo JP’s breathtaking corruption. The request is accessible at illegal-aid.co.za/JSC/PAIA.
The requested records will reveal the full extent of JSC’s protection of Mlambo JP since mid-2017 from being held to account for his crimes and other impeachable misconduct, and, if relevant records exist and are not criminally concealed, they may categorically prove that he abused his position as Judge President on the JSC, after ousting Hlophe JP from it, to try crushing me as the complainant against him. It looks pretty certain he was behind the JSC’s repeated malicious strikes against me, because he alone on the JSC had the motive to go after me in his fear and loathing of me, knowing I’m his nemesis. What remains to be seen is whether he manoeuvred against me on the record, or furtively behind the scenes by simply picking up the phone to the JSC’s then-secretary and twice instructing her to approach the Society to knock me down.
Records specified in Part Two of my PAIA request will be used in support of a further misconduct complaint against Mlambo JP concerning his grossly unethical abuse of power, to Hlophe JP’s immense prejudice on multiple scores, to secure the appointment of a certain woman to the JCC tribunal originally appointed in February 2013 to try the Constitutional Court’s complaint against him.
I have other such information of Mlambo JP’s grossly unethical abuse of his office for improper personal ends from two centrally placed, absolutely reliable informants with direct knowledge of the appalling facts they shared with me.
For the several reasons set out in my first complaint against Mlambo JP and in my invited comments on his response, there’s every indication that he authored the criminal ‘memorandum’ slipped to his long-time erstwhile Deputy in the Labour- and Labour Appeal Courts, Waglay JP, that perverted his decision of my petition for leave to appeal the dismissal of my labour action against Legal Aid SA (‘LASA’). (I chanced to discover the anonymous ‘memorandum’ in the court file some months later during a search for other records.) It strongly appears then that Mlambo JP committed precisely the impeachable offence of improperly influencing a judge in a pending case, indeed the crime of defeating the ends of justice, of which he recently convicted Hlophe JP for allegedly attempting.
My confidence in the integrity of the judges on the JSC and its JCC has naturally collapsed completely, thanks to (1) the JCC’s failure to hold Mlambo JP to account for his criminal and other impeachable conduct, and Zondi JA’s ludicrously disingenuous bid to exonerate him of it; (2) the JCC’s failure to rule on the hard evidence before it that Waglay JP corruptly threw a case at the written behest of a then-top-ranking officer at LASA, then chaired by Mlambo JP. My complaint against Waglay JP in June 2017, still undecided more than four years after it was lodged, with its supporting ‘memorandum’ found in the court file, is accessible at illegal-aid.co.za/JSC/Waglay_JP; and (3) the JSC’s vicious retaliation against me for duly lodging documented complaints against these corrupt judges, by trying to get me expelled from my profession, the better to devastate my credibility as complainant against them.
On account of all this, I’m currently preparing to escalate my complaints internationally. The several foreign embassies, also international credit rating agencies, also other interested parties that I intend informing about the unresolved corruption in the upper echelons of the South African judiciary, to which the JSC and its JCC have shown themselves to be shockingly indifferent, indeed have tried covering up, even to the extent of trying to exterminate me as a material witness, are enumerated both in my above-mentioned appeal notice and in the contextual notes to my PAIA request.
In light of these considerations, and more especially of what’s coming down the pipe, your appointment of Mlambo JP as next Chief Justice would be exceedingly imprudent.
