DA welcomes Parliament's legal opinion regarding release of NLC grant beneficiaries

15 July 2020

Note to Editors: The legal opinion document can be accessed here and here.

On Tuesday, the Portfolio Committee of Trade, Industry and Competition was presented with Parliament’s long awaited legal opinion regarding the disclosure of the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) grant beneficiaries for 2018-2019, 2019-2020 and the Covid-19 Relief Fund.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomes this legal opinion as it is congruent with the assertions made in our own legal opinion which we presented to the Committee last week Wednesday – which argued that the NLC had been acting unlawfully by failing to disclose grant beneficiaries.

Parliament’s legal opinion advised the Committee that “As to whether the assertion by the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) that previous publications of lists of beneficiaries, had been done erroneously, is correct, we submit that the assertion is incorrect and would not in our view withstand constitutional scrutiny. The NLC does not indicate whether the information concerning the beneficiaries fall within the information “submitted by any person in connection with any application for any licence, certificate or appointment under this Act” as envisaged in section 67 of the Lotteries Act”.

In addition, it argued that “…The NLC must clearly and precisely specify the grounds and the reasons for refusal of the information. The Committee must be directed to specific grounds of refusal together with the details which prevent its disclosure. The stance of the NLC seems to be that, there is a blanket prohibition on the provision of this information, which is untenable”.

Most embarrassingly, the ANC who attempted every manoeuvre in the dark arts playbook to try and prevent these lists from being published have been forced to accede that this information should be made public.

All of a sudden they have dubbed themselves “champions of transparency and accountability” however, the question must be asked where were they for the last 4 months?

Now that the NLC and its board have officially been labelled as constitutional delinquents – The DA’s efforts have been vindicated.

As agreed in the meeting, this information is to be provided to committee members as soon as physically possible and the DA will accept nothing less.

Failure to do so by the NLC will result in the DA subpoenaing them to appear before the committee to account.

There is no doubt that today is a victory for parliamentary democracy.

Issued by Mat Cuthbert, DA Shadow Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry and Economic Development, 15 July 2020