DA’s Burke defence leaves the party caught between retreat and denial

The facts at the heart of the Kastelo affair remain allegations, not findings – but the DA’s handling of them is no longer a matter of due process. Having defended Mark Burke, then backed his withdrawal from Parliament’s finance committees, the party now appears to be trying to claim both a principled U-turn and its original position, exposing a deeper problem of political discipline and credibility.

The underlying facts are, for now, allegations rather than findings. The Reserve Bank’s Financial Surveillance Department suspects Kastelo, the fintech company Mark Burke co-founded with his brother Nicholas in 2018, of using ordinary South Africans’ foreign exchange allowances – allowances capped by law precisely because the state wants to manage capital flight – to move roughly R4-billion offshore for the company’s own benefit.

The Gauteng Division of the High Court in Johannesburg has not ruled on whether that happened. It has ruled only that the SA Reserve Bank (Sarb) had a reasonable basis to suspect it and to freeze the company’s accounts while it investigates – an investigation that, by some estimates, could run for another two-and-a-half years. That distinction matters, and it is worth stating plainly before anything else: nobody, this column included, should get ahead of a process that is explicitly designed to establish what actually happened.

What is not still pending, however, is the DA’s own conduct over the past week, and it is that conduct, not the underlying Sarb investigation, that deserves scrutiny right now.

The party’s first instinct was full-throated defence. Federal chairperson Ashor Sarupen took the position that there was “no finding of wrongdoing” that would justify treating Burke as though one existed. This may be a fair legal point, but a curious one to lead with for a company whose founder and chairperson sat, at the time, on Parliament’s Standing Committee on Appropriations and as an alternate on the Standing Committee on Finance, the very structures meant to hold institutions like the Reserve Bank’s regulatory targets to account.

Party leader Geordin Hill-Lewis went further, telling the Sunday Times the party respected the independence of the Reserve Bank and the courts and would let the process run its course, while simultaneously stating, as fact, that Burke was no longer involved in Kastelo’s operations.

Within days, Burke had stepped back from both committees. Sarupen’s explanation to Daily Maverick was that the original defence had been built on a misreading, and that early coverage seemed to attribute the alleged conduct to Burke personally, and once that was clarified, Burke “voluntarily” withdrew from the finance cluster to avoid the appearance of conflict.

Perhaps. But the sequence is hard to separate from the pressure that preceded it. The ANC and EFF had by then both called publicly for Burke’s removal from those committees. The reversal followed that pressure, not the other way round, whatever language is used to describe it now.

There is a reason “the lady’s not for turning” has outlived the Margaret Thatcher’s speech it came from.