Scorpions: 220 MPs should recuse themselves

Hugh Glenister, quite rightly, wants corrupt MPs to step aside from voting on the Scorpions. It was the Scorpions after all that busted open the can of nasties that came to be known as the Travelgate scam, something the government continues to duck.

If you will recall, Travelgate involved members of parliament using travel vouchers, issued by the government to allow them to visit their constituencies, to go on luxurious holidays unrelated to their work.

Then, conspiring with unscrupulous travel agents, some MPs inflated claims for their travel allowances and banked the surplus. Others gave free air tickets to relatives.

The Scorpions have been instrumental in prosecuting those implicated in the scam. Now those same MPs get to decide on the disbandment of the unit akin to criminals deciding on who their prosecutor will be. Ludicrous! Only in the New! Improved! South Africa!™

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Businessman Hugh Glenister is seeking an urgent high court interdict to bar Travelgate MPs from debating the future of the Scorpions. He said at a Cape Town Press Club lunch that his lawyers were hoping to get a court date next week.

The application would seek to have "220 members if not more" disqualified on the grounds of conflict of interest from voting the Scorpions out of existence. Glenister is currently waiting for the outcome of a Constitutional Court hearing on his challenge to government plans to disband the unit.

His attorney, Kevin Louis, sent a letter to National Assembly Speaker, Baleka Mbete, on August 14 asking that MPs who had been investigated by the Scorpions in the Travelgate matter recuse themselves from consideration of the two bills that seek to shut down the unit.

Louis sent a second letter last week, saying Glenister would institute an urgent application for an interdict if there was no reply by August 22.

He told Sapa that as there had been no answer, the legal team was now drawing up the application, which would likely be filed later this week.

Before that happened, though, they had to get permission from Mbete to serve the papers at Parliament on her and the other MPs. Though the exact wording of the application had not been finalised, they would be seeking to place an obligation on Mbete, National Council of Provinces chairman Mninwa Mahlangu, and the chairmen of two portfolio committees to ensure that all MPs implicated in the Travelgate fraud saga or any other Scorpions probe recused themselves.

This would apply to Scorpions investigations past and present, Louis said. In the first letter to Mbete, Louis said the parliamentary code of conduct demanded MPs declare any personal interest in matters they were dealing with. Thereafter they had to withdraw, unless that forum decided that the interest was trivial or not relevant.

Glenister told the press club lunch that the number of MPs involved "should shock us all".

"More than 50 percent of your parliamentarians don't give a damn about taxpayers' money," he said.

He said politicians turning out as corrupt as the scoundrels they replaced was not an African problem.

"This is history repeating itself... this is basically politicians who are drunk with power."

"Most of the libertarians who have come before me have fought for the right to withhold tax. I wonder if that's where we've come to, because that is the only clear message we can send to our government.

"If you wish to abuse us, and take our hard-earned sweat and spend it in the way you please... then we have a right to say we will not give you this money, we will not give you this money for you to abuse us in return."