36 Pearson Street
Eshowe
15 April 2025
Your ref: NH/mg
Nadira Harripersad
Senior Legal Officer
Cc: Melissa Geldenhuys
Senior Administrator
Legal Practice Council
KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Office
Pietermaritzburg
By email: nadirah@lpc.org.za & melissag@lpc.org.za
Dear Ms Harripersad
LEGAL AID SA v BRINK:
LASA’S PROFESSIONAL MISCONDUCT COMPLAINT
AND
BRINK’S PAIA REQUEST FOR LPC RECORDS:
ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF AND AGREEMENT WITH LPC’S DECISION TO
RECONSIDER HOLDING A MISCONDUCT ENQUIRY
CONSENT TO EXTENSION OF TIME FOR COMPLIANCE WITH PAIA REQUEST AND FINAL DEMAND
FOR LPC’S RESPONSE
I refer to your email of 21 February 2025 concerning the
overdue response of the Legal Practice Council (‘LPC’) to my request five weeks
earlier for access to certain of its records, which I sought under the Promotion
of Access to Information Act (‘PAIA’).
I was gratified to read that the LPC intends reconsidering its shameful decision
to call me up for a disciplinary enquiry concerning the maliciously false charge
made against me in November 2015 by certain corrupt officers of Legal Aid SA
(‘LASA’), to wit that I unprofessionally complained in my several litigations
against it about then Board chairman Mlambo JP’s criminal and other capital
misconduct.
Which complaints, repeated to the Judicial Conduct Committee (‘JCC’) of Judicial
Service Commission (‘JSC’), were found well-made by JCC Appeal Committee members
Constitutional Court Justice Elizabeth Nkabinde and Supreme Court of Appeal
Justice Ephraim Makgoka on the documentary and other evidence I presented, and
they recommended accordingly that Mlambo JP be tried before a Judicial Conduct
Tribunal on the four most serious of them.
To explain my few weeks delay in replying to you in this decade-old saga: As
said in my email to you four days after yours, I was at the time ‘racing to
complete some papers for the Judicial Service Commission under time pressure,
and will reply to you fully as soon as I’m done’.
These papers were my appeal notice in the Waglay JP case, which I indeed later
completed and filed within the prescribed time. I’ll advert to this at the end.
The appeal notice and the JSC’s acknowledgment of it, along with all other
papers in the matter, can be accessed online via the hyperlink ‘DEVELOPMENTS in
the Waglay JA case’ at the top of the corrupt judges.co.za homepage.
After filing that appeal notice, I lost a couple of weeks due to some
unavoidable impediments and distractions, but anyway here we go:
In your email you stated:
1. With regard to your email dated 5 December 2024, we noted your attached
letter to the Constitutional Court
This is incorrect. My letter was addressed to Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka of
the Constitutional Court and Supreme Court of Appeal respectively, and copied
inter alia to JSC chairperson Mandisa Maya CJ. It was not written to the
Constitutional Court. It’s accessible online at corrupt-judges.co.za/LPC.
wherein you advised that your appeal was upheld against the dismissal of your
complaint against Mlambo JP.
Indeed my appeal against JCC member Zondi JA’s cavalier dismissal of my eight
complaints against Mlambo JP (not just one ‘complaint’) was upheld, in that that
Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka (a) found the four most serious of them to have
been well-founded; (b) overturned Zondi JA’s dismissal of these; and (c)
recommended accordingly that Mlambo JP be summoned to answer my four criminal
and other capital charges before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal.
Further, you had requested that the LPC refer the matter back to the
Investigating committee to consider this additional information
This is incorrect. I didn’t request this, but I’m glad to see from paragraph 4
of your email quoted below that, of its own accord and without being compelled
to do so by the High Court on review, the LPC will be sending the case back to
the Investigating Committee to reconsider its atrocious decision against me in
light of Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka’s 42-page ruling in my favour – on
exactly the same evidence – in which they concluded that Mlambo JP had a case to
answer before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal on multiple counts of criminal and
other impeachable misconduct.
Unlike Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka, who did so very diligently and
conscientiously, your Investigating Committee clearly failed to evaluate the
evidence before it properly or at all.
What I actually ‘requested’ was, inter alia, a copy of any LPC record vouching
that the Investigating Committee considered Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka’s
decision to uphold my appeal before ruling very disgustingly that LASA had
established a prima facie case of unprofessional conduct against me – for the
alleged offence of complaining of its erstwhile chairman Mlambo JP’s criminal
and other impeachable misconduct, as detailed and proved with supporting
documents in my litigations against LASA and later in complaints to the JSC; see
paragraph 7 of my PAIA request annexure.
2. In order for the committee to reconsider such information we request that
you provide us with a ruling confirming that your appeal was upheld or a case
number for such Appeal.
Annexed marked ‘A’ are material excerpts from Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka’s
ruling in my favour, which I’ve marked up to highlight their dicta going to the
heart of the matter. Their complete ruling upholding my appeal is annexed marked
‘B’.
Obviously I support the Investigating Committee’s reconsideration of its
disgraceful decision to proceed against me with a view to having me disbarred
for duly complaining of Mlambo JP’s capital misconduct – in other words it
decision to have me professionally killed as the complainant and witness against
him regarding his crimes and other acts of capital misconduct, all squarely
documented, as Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka found in their comprehensive review
and assessment of the case I’d made against him in my complaints.
3. In so far as your email dated 14 January 2025 and your PAIA request is
concerned, we advise that we are not receipt of the information contained in
your paragraphs 7, 8 & 9. This information did not serve before the
investigating committee for consideration as you had not provided such at the
time of the matter being referred to an Investigating committee. Should you
however require the Committee to consider same we request that you provide our
Offices with the information together with the information in para1 above.
Concerning ‘the information contained in [my] paragraphs 7, 8 & 9’:
(a) Paragraph 7 of my PAIA request annexure referred to the majority decision of
the Judicial Conduct Committee Appeal Committee to uphold my appeal regarding my
most serious criminal and other impeachable complaints against Mlambo JP. See
annexures ‘A’ and ‘B’ hereto, mentioned above.
(b) Paragraph 8 of my PAIA request annexure referred to the pathetically
irregular and judicially reviewable (coming up) ‘decision of the small Judicial
Service Commission to reject Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka’s finding and
recommendation’. It’s annexed marked ‘C’.
(c) Paragraph 9 of my PAIA request annexure referred to the ‘the transcript of
the discussion by the Judicial Service Commission (JSC’) of Justices Nkabinde
and Makgoka’s finding and recommendation’ revealing what an unlawful shambles it
was, as Zondo CJ (as he then was) repeatedly warned his fellow commissioners.
It’s annexed marked ‘D’.
4. We advise that we will pend the Disciplinary hearing subject to the
additional information to be submitted by yourself. Once we are in receipt of
the information, we will refer the matter to an Investigating committee to
consider.
Good idea, but several points warrant emphasizing in this regard, to be stated
at below.
5. In the interim, I am of the opinion that it is premature to reply to your
PAIA request but instead suggest that we allow for the internal processes to
foll[ow].
Your ‘opinion that it is premature to reply to [my] PAIA request’ is legally
incorrect and flatly contradicted by the provisions of PAIA cited below; and the
LPC’s failure to respond within the 30-day timeframe prescribed by section 25 of
the Act is both an unlawful breach of the Act and a violation of my
constitutionally guaranteed right to public body information guaranteed by
section 32(1)(a) of the Constitution – a serious matter, especially for a
lawyers’ organisation that ought to know better.
Notwithstanding your mistaken ‘opinion’ about the LPC’s response to my PAIA
request being ‘premature’, I naturally support the route you ‘suggest’, namely
‘that we allow for the internal processes to foll[ow]’ – specifically that the
Investigating Committee proceed to reconsider its appalling decision to try me
before a disciplinary enquiry on LASA’s foul and baseless charge that I
professionally misconducted myself in very properly protesting in my litigations
against LASA Mlambo JP’s documented criminal and other capital misconduct while
chairman of its Board, having regard to Nkabinde J and Makgoka JA’s finding upon
a thorough evaluation of the evidence I presented that my most serious criminal
and other capital charges against him disclosed four counts of judicial
misconduct fit for trial before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal.
To correct your wrong ‘premature’ ‘opinion’: Section 25 prescribes that a
request made under section 18 for access to public body records must be
responded to within 30 days (or within an extended maximum of 60 days in certain
specific circumstances defined by section 26 that justify such a delayed
response). And section 23 requires that the information officer certify on oath
any specified records that don’t exist.
What this means is that my constitutionally entrenched entitlement to the public
body records I’ve requested, and my right to access them within the said
prescribed timeframe, is independent of, and not contingent upon, the progress
of any of the LPC’s ‘internal processes’.
In other words, PAIA does not permit a records requestor to be kept waiting for
the records he’s duly requested while the public body concerned is having
frightened second thoughts about whether or not it made a total hash of a
disciplinary matter before it, and then only respond to the records request once
it’s decided to reverse its dreadful mistake or very stupidly persist with it.
Section 11 of PAIA provides that a requester’s reasons for seeking access to
records, whether stated by the requester or imagined by the information officer,
are irrelevant to a requester’s constitutional entitlement to access a duly
requested record.
I didn’t state my reasons, but you’d have been correct had you surmised that I
was preparing to take the LPC’s ignominious decision against me on judicial
review with a view to having it set aside. But such undeclared intentions at the
time, which you might have correctly guessed from the contextual notes
accompanying each record specification in my PAIA Form A annexure, are quite
irrelevant to my right to promptly access the records in question and to receive
a sworn certificate in any case that a record I’ve requested doesn’t exist.
In other words, the operation of these provisions of PAIA giving effect to my
constitutional right to public body records is not suspended, and a response to
a PAIA request for public body records cannot be ‘premature’, just because the
public body in question has decided to revisit and clean up the scandalous mess
it made of a disciplinary case by jumping to side with a criminally corrupt
judge against an unusually honest advocate – having failed to consider properly
or at all exactly the same documentary and other evidence of that corrupt
judge’s crimes and other capital misconduct that rocked Justices Nkabinde and
Makgoka.
Put directly, PAIA requires the LPC to surrender the records in its possession
that I’ve duly requested, and to certify on oath any that don’t exist, within
the time prescribed, irrespective of how it’s getting on with revisiting its
embarrassing decision to proceed with a disciplinary enquiry against me for duly
complaining of Mlambo JP’s criminal and other impeachable misconduct and proving
it with supporting documents and other evidence, comprehensively reviewed by
Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka in the 42-page review of it all, and found cogent
enough to put Mlambo JP on his defence before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal.
We trust that this adequately resolves your queries raised and we will await the
information required by you [sic: required by the LPC].
Actually, I didn’t raise any queries. I duly requested access to a number of
documents under section 18 of PAIA, and if any of them don’t exist, section 23
requires the LPC’s information officer or duly delegated deputy information
officer to certify this on oath.
The further 30 to respond that I might have consented to under section 26(1)(e)
of PAIA has expired, so the LPC is strictly in default, but I conditionally
waive the point and agree to another month running from today for the delivery
to me of (a) the records I’ve requested and (b) where any specified records
don’t exist, an affidavit to this effect. If the LPC belatedly complies with my
request, its unlawful delay will become practically moot.
Let me repeat the legal advice I gave the LPC at the foot of my PAIA Form A
annexure: Only the LPC’s information officer (identified in section 1 of PAIA)
or a deputy information officer holding a written delegation under section 17
may respond to my request; and any other person, whether a high legal officer or
the tea-lady, will be legally incompetent to do so.
I’m extremely bitter about the atrocious mishandling of LASA’s complaint, first
by the Society of Advocates of KwaZulu-Natal* and now by the LPC, and it’s
caused me incalculable professional and personal harm. (*Described in paragraphs
61–325 of my response to LASA’s complaint that I delivered to the LPC. It’s also
online at illegal-aid.co.za/LPC.)
I demand a prompt reconsideration and final decision of the case, and I will not
tolerate the LPC taking another several years over the matter, like it did after
I sent in my response to the complaint on 2 June 2021. With my reputation lying
in the gutter all the while.
The reason I didn’t take the LPC’s failure to announce its decision of the
complaint for so many years after I gave it my response is that I assumed it had
been thrown out with the trash and had quietly died. It was inconceivable to me
that after reading my response, together with my eight complaints I made against
Mlambo JP to the JSC, copies of which I furnished the Society of Advocates to
whom LASA originally complained against me, and which the LPC received from it
on taking the matter over, the LPC could possibly have been ‘satisfied that
there is prima facie evidence that you are guilty of misconduct’ for duly
complaining of Mlambo JP’s documented criminal and other impeachable misconduct
committed while chairman of LASA’s Board.
In other words, it was unimaginable to me that the complainant could find
himself not in the witness stand but in the dock in place of the original
accused. But then I overlooked that we live in the New South Africa, in which
the most brazen corruption and its cover-up at the highest levels of state has
become entirely normal, and anything goes nowadays, including in the judiciary,
and, I see now, also over at the LPC, so I really shouldn’t have been so
terribly surprised.
But everything’s changed with the Investigating Committee’s untruthfully false
claim to have duly considered the case, and its corrupt and derogatory verdict
that I’m facially guilty of professional misconduct for having duly complained
of Mlambo JP’s crimes and other capital misconduct, even as Justices Nkabinde
and Makgoka have found that my complaints disclose an answerable case against
him before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal.
I quote from the LPC’s nauseating November 2024 letter to me:
‘We confirm that the complaint [of professional misconduct, made by LASA in
November 2015] has been considered by an Investigating Committee and that the
Committee is satisfied that there is prima facie evidence that you are guilty of
misconduct which warrants misconduct proceedings to be instituted against you.
The Committee has referred the matter to a Disciplinary Committee for
adjudication.’
I demand that this filth poured over my personal and professional reputation by
the LPC’s lawyers who falsely and corruptly condemned me be hosed off
immediately.
Be advised that if the LPC fails to act expeditiously to reverse its defamatory
provisional judgment of professional misconduct against me, and fails to acquit
me absolutely of LASA’s false charge in clear and unequivocal terms, I will sue
under section 6(2)(g) of the Promotion of Administration Justice Act (‘PAJA’)
for an order compelling it to do so, and will act without further notice,
attaching this letter to my papers.
And I’m not bluffing: I’m working on this vast corruption case virtually
full-time, and in pursuing it (a) I’ve repeatedly sued LASA and the JSC
successfully in the past; (b) have several pending litigations pending against
them both; and (c) have more in the pipe. All court papers in these cases are
accessible online at illegal-aid.co.za and corrupt judges.co.za.
My appeal notice in the Waglay JP case records my intention to copy it to the
American Embassy, given the US Administration’s express interest in the runaway
corruption in our country, among other major problems here.
This concern is not new: the Biden Administration previously raised it in its
note verbale in January 2019 co-signed by the ambassadors of the United Kingdom,
Germany, Switzerland, and The Netherlands and delivered directly to President
Ramaphosa, demanding that he combat more vigorously the pervasive public sector
corruption in our country that had become internationally notorious.
Little did they know that this corruption had metastasized into the judiciary,
as Zondo DCJ (as he then was) learned from several high-ranking and protected
witnesses testifying before his State Capture Commission about ‘Project
Justice’, a rogue operation of the State Security Agency (‘SSA’) to bribe judges
with millions of rands in cash to corruptly throw their cases to factional
political ends, which evidence Zondo DCJ accepted as true in his final report on
the corruption of the SSA. I’ve posted highlighted material excerpts from it at
corrupt-judges.co.za/Project_Justice/Project_Justice.pdf.
Shortly after filing my appeal notice in the Waglay JP case, I discovered that
Acting US Ambassador Dana Brown named therein had just been succeeded by Richard
Greene pro tem, and right after that President Trump announced his decision to
appoint Brent Bozell as next permanent Ambassador here. So I’ve decided to hold
my covering letter to the US Ambassador until he’s been confirmed by Congress,
has been officially appointed, and has arrived here to assume his post.
Now that South Africa is ‘on a watch-list’, as President Trump encouragingly
announced at the Kennedy Center on 17 March 2025 for its widespread corruption
and domestic and foreign policies, characteristic of your standard failed Third
World state, I intend reporting to the next US Ambassador the names of those
members of the LPC Investigating Committee who corruptly moved to destroy me
professionally for complaining of Mlambo JP’s criminal and other impeachable
corruption – and complaining about it very properly, as Justices Nkabinde and
Makgoka found in their ruling in my favour – and I will propose that those
corrupt LPC lawyers’ names be added to the list of public officers and political
leaders that the US is reportedly preparing to sanction. Along with other judges
who’ve acted to cover for Mlambo JP, not relevant to identify here.
In conclusion, I repeat my demand (a) that the LPC reverse its false finding
against me without delay, or I’ll be applying to the High Court under section
6(2)(g) of PAJA for an order compelling it to do so, and (b) that the LPC’s
information officer, or a duly delegated deputy information officer holding a
written delegation under section 17 of PAIA, and no one else, respond to my
January 2025 records request by 15 May 2025, failing which I’ll be seeking the
Information Regulator’s support under section 77A, and if that doesn’t work I’ll
apply to the High Court under section 78 for a declarator that the LPC has
violated my constitutional right to information in failing to comply with my
records request, and for an order compelling it to do so.
Yours sincerely
ANTHONY BRINK