South African Prosecutor’s Office drops all corruption charges against President Ramaphosa

MADRID 11 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –

The South African Prosecutor’s Office has withdrawn all accusations against the country’s president, Cyril Rampahosa, accused of corruption and money laundering in relation to the theft of approximately 500,000 euros from his farm in the province of Limpopo. in the north of the country, in 2020.

The matter began to get complicated when the former director of the National Intelligence Agency Arthur Fraser alleged that the amount of money stolen was much larger, about 3.5 million euros, and was hidden in some furniture on the estate.

Ramaphosa has denied from the first moment that he had incurred any type of illegality in the storage of the money – the president alleges that he received it after selling a group of buffaloes – and denounced attempts to manipulate the subsequent investigation.

The case put Rampahosa between a rock and a hard place two years ago, when he was on the verge of resigning from office, but finally decided to continue in the Presidency after the majority of Parliament sided with him in the face of an opposition attempt to subject him to impeachment.

It is worth remembering that successive judicial control bodies – and even the Prosecutor’s Office itself, in June last year – exempted Ramaphosa from all negligence and confirmed that the president had presented correct declarations of all his properties and transactions, although the half million of euros in question is still missing.

South African opposition parties such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have criticized the DA’s decision as “a continuation of a pattern of key state institutions to shield Ramaphosa from accountability for his actions.” actions,” according to the spokesperson for the left-wing party, Leigh-Ann Mathys, in statements to the South African news portal IOL.