Character assassination to silence corruption-busting lawyers…

Four months ago, two top lawyers – who had cracked open the Corruption Mafia at Fort Hare University – were arrested by 20 heavily-armed military style police and jetted off to the Eastern Cape. One of them, Sarah Burger, was left in a jail cell for six days without access to an attorney. In this interview with BizNews, she says: “…there’s character assassination in order to gag witnesses, which I believe is what has happened to us. There are people being shot at and assassinated and murdered because people are trying to cover up truths that are out there. Now the retaliation that we’ve experienced – and which we believe is very politically motivated – is that we’ve uncovered something and we formed a view based on thousands and thousands of documents. And that view and the evidence that supports it is now turned as a smoking gun towards us because we are effectively the wrongdoers now and we need to be silenced.” Burger and Bradley Conradie – who still have not even been questioned by police and have not been told what the allegations against them are – have instructed their attorney to notify the State that they will be suing them for “huge” constitutional violations. Despite their treatment, they are continuing to support law enforcement in their investigations into the corruption at Fort Hare in the hope that at least some of those cases will be prosecuted in the future.

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Extended transcript of the interview   ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Chris Steyn (00:03.238)

Four months ago, two top lawyers who had cracked open the Corruption Mafia at Fort Hare University got arrested Hollywood style. Two months later, they told their story on BizNews. Today I’m catching up with one of those lawyers, Sarah Burger. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Burger (00:22.674)

Hi Chris, thank you

Chris Steyn (00:25.5)

Firstly, Sarah, I want to know how you’re doing.

Sarah Burger (00:29.995)

Well, I don’t want to make it sound sloppy, but it’s still a very difficult time for us. I think that what people don’t understand and what people have moved on from is that on the 28th of March, we may have been arrested, but there’s been an enormous domino effect of that arrest. And so many different facets of our lives are affected by the repercussions of that arrest, in particular because we are lawyers and lawyers trade off reputation and integrity. And of course, this has had a fundamental impact on both of us and our businesses.

Chris Steyn (01:09.042)

Now has there been any progress with your case? There was much confusion about the charges.

Sarah Burger (01:15.872)

Yeah. Well, I think the starting point for that is that to date, we’ve never been questioned. You know, I read with horror that I see these high level politicians in the newspapers that get accused of fraud and corruption and there’s solid evidence and the public are aware of them. I think about the VBS scandal that’s circulating in the media at the moment and people that have come on affidavit with supporting evidence. Yet, there’s no private jets coming to collect them. And, you know, I wondered to myself how it is possible that somebody that is accused of fraud and corruption and there is solid evidence of it, walks out of Cape Town Police Station and walks straight into Parliament and gets admitted as an MP on the same day. Yet, we get flown Hollywood style to the Eastern Cape without even having been questioned, and with a case that was only opened in January. 

So what we’ve done is we’ve asked our attorneys to please request from the law enforcement and the NPA what the allegations are against us. Because to date, there is no docket. There is no A1. I’m learning about criminal law as well. I’m not a criminal lawyer. But I believe that the main complainant has to file an A1, and to date that has not been made available to us. 

So since the 28th of March to date, we have actually in fact volunteered in jail in East London to speak with the police and to get an understanding of what it is exactly and the reasons why we are there. But to date we are still in the dark and to date the evidence has not been provided – and the only conclusion that we can reach is that there has been no proper investigation that has been completed and that we were, you know, on this rushed, in this very rushed manner, we were arrested and flown off to the Eastern Cape.

Chris Steyn (03:27.164)

What are the biggest challenges that you are dealing with right now?

Sarah Burger (03:32.499)

There’s, you know, there’s so many of them. You know, in the mornings I wake up and I sit at the edge of my bed and I tell myself, Sarah, today you’re going to have another challenge that is coming and it’s going to probably be another blow. So you’re going to have to prepare yourself for it mentally. And the success in it is that I’m able to get over the blows on a daily basis a little bit quicker than what I was previously.

But the horror story of the arrests on the 28th of March has just perpetuated itself on a daily basis. So some of the examples of that, and I can take it right back to the day after I was released out on bail. I wasn’t going to leave my colleague Bradley behind in the Eastern Cape. I wanted to ensure that I could be there to support him for as long as possible. And he asked me to reach out to a human rights lawyer so that we could brief a senior advocate that could come down and bring an urgent application for him to come out on bail. When I phoned this prominent, purported human rights lawyer, thinking that because he was a friend of Bradley’s for more than 20 years, that he would already have a team of people together and an urgent application brought and people flying into the Eastern Cape. I was instead met with, do not contact me, I do not want to speak with you. And he threw the phone down in my ear. Now, I, at that stage, spent six days in jail. I’ve only been out for a couple of hours. I sunk down to my knees in this hotel room, and I just wept because I thought to myself, my goodness, the reality I thought we were going to be living of support and collegiality and your colleagues coming to assist you, is not a reality.

And so I think the backdrop of what your question really is is that there were two deaths that took place on the 28th of March. It was the death of Sarah Burger, as she knew herself then, and the death of Bradley Conradie, as he knew himself then. And I mean that in all your experiences and all the work and his 25-year career history and my budding career in forensics.

Sarah Burger (05:59.494)

And it’s taken me now since the 28th of March to accept one fundamental thing is that our lives will never ever be the same again. Some of the other things that we had to face and that’s the kind of blow that I speak about that happens on a daily basis. You get met with abandonment, you get met with family members that don’t want to speak to you at all. And that’s just based on false media reporting. There are staff members that have left. There are colleagues in the industry who reached out to say, let’s have a lunch together, but then offer opportunistically to take over all your clients because your career is over essentially, is what you get told. 

Sarah Burger (06:53.988)

Then one of the, I think one of the worst…besides the human rights lawyer, for me, was two months after I came out of jail, I started picking up a little bit of momentum again and work and started attending to matters face to face because I needed to start getting back into things again. Not that I didn’t stop working, it was just being more client facing and just getting myself out there again.

Sarah Burger (07:22.936)

I contacted a polygrapher, a guy named Pierre Reeves of True Lies. And I offered him the opportunity to quote for a matter that I was running. And two weeks later, said to him, Pierre, you know, we need to finalise this. We need your polygrapher to come out and attend to this matter rather urgently. And I need to know that you’ve got capacity to do so. He then contacted me back and said that he was unfortunately conflicted because I’d been suspended by the AIFCI, the Financial Crimes Investigators Association, and that he had connections to the Hawks. And he said in no uncertain terms, he referred to me as Modack. And he said, you see, Sarah, if Modack came to me and asked me for his assistance, I’d not be able to help him in the very same way that I can’t help you. And I said to him, Pierre, the problem that I have with what you’re saying to me is: Number one, we are colleagues in the industry. Number two, I’m an attorney and I operate the highest ethical standards in all of my work. How could you ever compare me to Modack? And Number three, I said, we have not been suspended from AICFI and he said, you have, it in the minutes, and it was a public announcement. A month prior to that, we had been suspended from the Commercial Forensic Practitioners Association as well. And both of these suspensions were done just on the basis of media articles that were subsequently corrected. 

We then decided we were going to bring a PAIA application because we weren’t even given the opportunity to defend a suspension based on fake media articles. And then we thought long and hard about it. When I say we, mean Bradley and I, and we just decided we have so much to deal with. It is not like our lives could just start and we could say, great, we’re only going to focus on our work and we’re only going to focus on our case. We’re having to mitigate so many different aspects that you just have to choose your battles.

Sarah Burger (09:48.147)

And we just wrote to them and we just said, we find your conduct absolutely despicable as forensic associations and knowing the climate that is in South Africa and knowing what is happening. People are, there’s character assassination in order to gag witnesses, which I believe is what has happened to us. There are people being shot at and assassinated and murdered because people are trying to cover up truths that are out there. For them to immediately suspend us is an absolute horror show. But I recorded that recording of the conversation with myself and Pierre, and I listened to it on several occasions. And I couldn’t believe how people behave. I think just in closing on this is that all of these things that I’ve said now has led to one very, very deep spiritual point for us. And that is we’ve gotten to understand true human nature in the gravest of times.

Chris Steyn (10:52.924)

Now are you planning to take action or are you already initiating action in response to the way you were arrested?

Sarah Burger (11:02.877)

Yes, we have instructed our attorney to notify the State that we will be suing them. The basis for that case is huge constitutional violations. I don’t want to go into too many of them. I’ll just say that, for instance, as an attorney myself, I was denied the opportunity to speak to an attorney whilst I laid in jail. So there are many of those examples that took place and, of course, the force as well with which we were arrested. We are officers of the court and we could merely just be summoned but they brought 20 heavily-armed military style police to come and arrest us and then jet us off to the Eastern Cape which could have only cost thousands and thousands of rands. But yeah we are most definitely not going to drop this.

Chris Steyn (12:02.246)

Meanwhile, what is becoming of all those corruption investigations you did at Fort Hare? What’s going to become of those cases?

Sarah Burger (12:12.187)

You know, I just go back to the feeling that I felt when I got out of jail. I thought to myself, I had committed four years to the university, Bradley six. And I thought that an entire portion of my life had just been cut out, you know, and it was no longer in existence because my credibility as a witness would be irreparably damaged. You know, the first question that any good defense lawyer would ask me, have I ever been arrested and what are those allegations?

So, I thought at that point in time, and I felt quite helpless that none of these matters will proceed, but we have since had long discussions about it and we cannot let any of those matters rest. Of course, we are not law enforcement, but we have extended our hand to law enforcement and we’ve said in whichever way we can support you on those matters and in pursuing them, we will. And to date, to date we have been supporting law enforcement. So we hope that those matters will be taken forward. Despite only one arrest from 2019, we are hopeful that those matters will be prosecuted in the near future.

Chris Steyn (13:26.022)

Has this experience deterred you from uncovering corruption and fighting corruption?

Sarah Burger (13:32.771)

Absolutely not. Again, initially it was a fright reaction, like I need to get away from forensics, this is too dangerous. But I have to remind myself of this. Being a forensic lawyer is no different to being any type of lawyer. We don’t have some preconceived idea about somebody when we look at an investigation as a lawyer. We look at the facts objectively and we pursue them. Now the retaliation that we’ve experienced and which we believe is very politically motivated is that we’ve uncovered something and we formed a view based on thousands and thousands of documents. And that view and the evidence that supports it is now turned as a smoking gun towards us because we are effectively the wrongdoers now and we need to be silenced. 

And I can send a message out to the people that I investigated. I will not stop. And I will continue to support law enforcement. And where there is wrongdoing, you are going to have to pay the price. I did not decide your actions for you. One of the people that we investigated, and I have to just say this because it is so peculiar. I’d just come out on bail, and this gentleman who sold registrations at the university in return for money, he would wipe their debt, get them registered, and then he would receive cash from his friend that would stand in line. He was also involved in cover quoting into the hundreds of thousands of rands. He phoned our firm and he asked one of the attorneys at the firm, laughing on the phone, so what is going to happen to your star witness now that she was arrested over the weekend? He’s also gone on to comment on several articles that were in the media as well. But when I said to one of the journalists that had written an article that he commented on, I said, reach out to him, because I’m quite happy for you to ask him what the charges were and why he was found guilty at a disciplinary hearing. And he went completely silent.

Sarah Burger (16:01.524)

So the evidence against people, I don’t wake up in the morning and say, oh goody, I’m going to ruin somebody’s life. It is painful to do that. It is painful to have to damage somebody’s income that’s going to have a knock-on effect with their family members, with their children. But we don’t do it on a subjective approach that we’re going to, you I’m going to take out and you I’m going to sort out. If the evidence does not speak to the charges, then we will concede that and we will tell our clients there is no basis to discipline this person. That is the end of the matter. If there is a basis, the criminal complaints and the evidence will support that.  So, as I said, we are going to continue to support law enforcement like we are already doing.

Chris Steyn (16:49.852)

Thank you. That was Sarah Burger, forensic lawyer, who was one of two lawyers who had cracked open the Corruption Mafia at Fort Hare University only to find themselves arrested Hollywood style. Thank you, Sarah. And I’m Chris Steyn.

Read also:

• How decades of fraud and corruption plague the University of Fort Hare
• Hard Truths: The GNU, Shell’s exit, corruption & ethics – Professor Bonang Mohale
• Top corruption-busting lawyers in the fight of their lives….