If Atul and Rajesh Gupta are sent back to South Africa to answer investigators’ many questions, it will be a sign of belated progress
”: monumental graft involving public contracts worth at least 49bn rand going to Gupta-linked firms. It was said that the cost to the wider economy was many times more; the cost to South Africa’s reputation unquantifiable. The Gupta brothers left the country for Dubai around the time that Mr Zuma stepped down in 2018. Mr Zuma and the Guptas deny doing anything wrong and have described the allegations against them as politically motivated.
To understand the implications, recall what the Guptas are alleged to have wrought. The Indian-born brothers, who moved to South Africa in the 1990s, befriended members of the newly ascendant African National Congress, including Mr Zuma. According to several investigations, most recently a judge-led inquiry into state capture, after Mr Zuma became president the Gupta brothers used their relationship to have pliant officials appointed to state-owned enterprises and government departments.
In hindsight, the Guptas peaked in October 2015. That month, according to his account, Mcebisi Jonas, the deputy finance minister, was asked by a son of Mr Zuma to visit the Indian family’s compound in Johannesburg. He says he was offered 600m rand to take his boss’s job and “work with them”—and if he had a big enough bag, he could have 600,000 rand in cash that night.
If Atul and Rajesh are sent back to South Africa to answer investigators’ many questions, it will be a sign of belated progress. But there remains a long way to go. The arrests were made in response to a “red notice” by Interpol—a request by one member of the organisation to have suspects arrested pending possible extradition.
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