AmaBhungane and Tiso Blackstar have won their court application to gain access to a report commissioned by Steinhoff regarding alleged accounting irregularities that caused a massive drop in its share price in 2017.
The impact of this decision is that legitimate requests for access to information from, for example, companies mired in scandal, cannot be ignored or deflected by briefing attorneys to do their bidding. The news of Jooste's resignation caused the share price of the company – once held up as a paragon in the business world – to drop by some 95%.
The FM and amaBhungane believed this to be wholly unsatisfactory and joined forces to approach the Western Cape High Court to set aside Steinhoff's decision.While the media applicants raised several arguments about why Steinhoff was wrong to refuse access to the PwC report, we succeeded on the first of these: that Steinhoff's claims to legal privilege were not backed up by the evidence.
This, the court found, was sufficient for the purposes of PAIA, confirming once again the strong role played by access to information as an enabler of journalists' freedom of expression. Steinhoff's argument about legal privilege rested on three pieces of evidence, which the court considered in turn. The court concluded that neither their engagement letter with PwC, nor the SENS announcement issued by Steinhoff, nor their say-so claiming legal privilege were sufficient to show that the report was commissioned in contemplation of litigation.
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