Next Booysen went to court to have Jiba’s racketeering authorisations set aside.
In March 2014 Judge Gorven ordered that the racketeering charges must be withdrawn because the documents Jiba said she relied on, including my unsigned and unsworn statement, did not provide a rational basis for her decision to issue the authorizations. Judge Gorven said : “Even accepting the least stringent test for rationality imaginable, the decision of the NDPP does not pass muster.”
When I found out that the NPA had used my draft notes from our first meeting at the South African embassy in Greece back in 2012 and submitted them to court without my knowledge, I felt betrayed and confused. Their incompetent actions not only violated my rights as a witness for the prosecution, but damaged the case against the Cato Manor unit, as well as placed me in a vulnerable position.
It must be pointed out that in Judge Gorven’s ruling, he emphasised that his judgement did “not amount to a finding that Mr Booysen is not guilty of the offences … That can only be decided by way of a criminal trial.” Underscoring this point, Gorven denied Booysen’s application to interdict the NDPP from issuing fresh authorisations. Gorven’s judgement was clearly sound, but it left me twisting in the wind.
SEE: 14. Gorven judgement
On the 6th May 2014, around a month after the Gorven judgement, my South African attorney Julian Knight wrote to the NPA complaining that we had no feedback on the progress of the MLA application, my need for witness protection, and the timetable of the case. On 22 May 2014 he emailed the NPA again to complain about the Noseweek character assassination attempts via fake news against myself, as well as our complaint to Press Ombudsman. In early 2015 the NPA sent a peculiar letter to my attorney. I was surprised to read that the NPA was suddenly expressing concern with “other offences” that I might be implicated in, and “had not disclose to their investigators”. In the meantime, I read in the media that Advocate Jiba, the head of the NPA at the time, had taken an unsigned, unsworn draft statement from my previous interactions with the NPA, and submitted it in court proceedings as a sworn affidavit of mine, without my consent. This was a serious breach of my legal rights by the NPA in South Africa, and placed me at a great risk, since I had not received any witness protection and yet the NPA had gone behind my back and submitted a fake affidavit with my details on it.
Clearly the planted Daily News article had made the NPA prosecutors doubt me. I called General Mabula, the investigator of the Cato Manor case, and protested regarding this letter as well as my serious concerns of a breach of confidentiality by the NPA, by allowing my attorney/client privileged communication to leak to the media in South Africa. I demanded an explanation as well as a retraction of the NPA’s letter to my attorney. General Mabula sounded surprised and denied that such letter was issued.