Mustard Seed Technologies v News24

Ruling: Acting Press Ombud

Complaint number: 000593

Author: Khaya Koko

Headline: ‘Everyone has a price’: NPA investigating Hawks ‘bribes’ in R64m City Power fraud case

Publication Date: 11 April 2026

Date lodged: 14 / 28 April 2026

Link to story: https://www.news24.com/investigations/everyone-has-a-price-npa-investigating-hawks-bribes-in-r64m-city-power-fraud-case-20260410-1152

Particulars

1. This ruling is based on correspondence by Sive Dukada from -Thomson Wilks Attorneys, Notaries, Conveyancers, on behalf of Mustard Seed Technologies (MST), and that of Khaya Koko, investigative journalist, as well as of George Claassen, News24’s Public Editor.
2. The complaint is about articles that were published on 6 October 2025, 31 January 2026, and 11 April 2026 respectively.
3. However, due to lateness, the Public Advocate of the Press Council quite correctly declined to accept the complaint about the first two articles.
4. This has considerately complicated matters, as arguments for and against are referring to the first two articles as well – which are not the focus of this adjudication.
5. I have therefore asked Mustard Seed Technologies (MST) to confine its complaint to the April 11 article.
6. News24 was given an opportunity to respond to the confined complaint. It indicated that a new response was not necessary.

The article

7. The article is about an investigation by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), led by Andy Mothibi, into allegations that senior members of the Gauteng Hawks have accepted bribes to cover up a major corruption case involving Johannesburg’s electricity utility, City Power.
8. The information was reportedly based on seven sources in the NPA, the Hawks and the police, “including documentary evidence, seen by News24, from the respective national offices”.
9. It inter alia alleges that:

a. Ebrahim Kadwa, the head of the Gauteng Hawks, is accused of protecting two senior Hawks officers who allegedly received cash bribes from Tshifularo Mashava, the CEO of City Power.

b. The “bribes” were allegedly used to derail an initial corruption investigation opened in October 2024 into suspected fraud and corruption at the utility.

c. The case concerns a contract for electrical infrastructure that allegedly increased from about R18 million to more than R64.4 million, with prosecutors claiming the equipment has never been delivered.

d. Mashava and Adelia Fani, the director of MST, and two other City Power executives, were accused of inflating the purchase of electrical infrastructure from an initial R18 million quote to more than R64.4 million.

e. They were reportedly issued with arrest warrants in November 2025. However, the arrests were allegedly blocked at the last minute by senior NPA officials who said the case was not yet ready for prosecution.

f. A whistleblower claims Hawks officers leaked evidence he had provided to the people whom he had accused of corruption. He alleges Mashava later showed him the same evidence and remarked that “everyone has a price.”

  10. The investigation, conducted by the NPA’s Ethics and Accountability Office, is reportedly at an advanced stage.

11. The City Power matter is one of several corruption cases that allegedly faced interference by senior officials.

The complaint

12. The nub of MST’s complaint is that the article:

a. names them in the context of a serious criminal conspiracy – the overall impression created is one of established guilt. More specifically, it complains that the statement that the company is “… accused of inflating the purchase of electrical infrastructure from an initial R18 million quote to more than R64.4 million” is untrue and unfair, as they expressly and categorically denied involvement in the specific projects cited;

b. does not identify the source of that accusation and does not flag it as a disputed allegation;

c. states the core allegations as fact, rather than as disputed claims – the use of quotation marks around some charged words elsewhere in the article does not cure this. The reasonable reader would not understand the specific passage about MST as an unproven allegation;

d. does not consider an alternative perspective that implies that MST may be innocent (as it is entitled to be presumed to be) and itself a victim of reckless allegations;

e. presents no denial or context from the company against such allegations;

f. publishes the (serious) allegation that Hawks officers were bribed in connection with its case, and that the NPA head launched an investigation into alleged “criminal conduct” surrounding the prosecution. They submit:

i. “These … allegations further entrench the narrative that the Complainant is a corrupt actor at the centre of a serious criminal conspiracy. Yet the article contains no context whatsoever from the Complainant’s perspective”; and

ii. does not refer to its denial and neither does it acknowledge that the failure to execute an arrest warrant itself (and any formal decision not to do so) may have raised questions over the legitimacy of its issuance in the first place.

g. refers to the report which implies that they were not guilty – but “the article used it only to advance a narrative about Hawks corruption, while continuing to present Ms Fani as a guilty party. That is an irreconcilable imbalance,” they submit; and

h. states that the electrical devices “were never delivered”. However, this wording comes from a charge sheet, which is a document of accusation and not of proof – and yet, it presents the accusation as a factual conclusion.

Relief sought

13. MST asks for an apology, published with equal prominence to the article in dispute on all the relevant platforms, as well as for a retraction of the article, alternatively to publish a correction and a clarification with due prominence, expressly recording that the allegations remain unproven.

Reply to the complaint

Allegations as facts

14. News24 denies that the article states allegations as facts, as already indicated by the headline. The article then details what the investigations entail and who was leading the probe.
15. It denies that the article states as a fact that MST conspired to defraud people – it merely reports allegations from official state documents.

Sources of information

16. News24 says official documents from the Hawks and the NPA allege that MST has conspired to defraud City Power, “… and we clearly stated the sources of those allegations”.
17. “These very documents that we used in our reporting form part of the NPA’s investigation into why the arrest warrants were not executed. The documents include the charge sheet.”
18. Claassen and Koko explain that the information about inflated prices, the alleged lack of delivery, or incomplete work is detailed by City Power, the City of Johannesburg, and the Gauteng provincial government, which funded the procurement for which MST was contracted.
19. They add that internal and publicly available documents from those institutions outlined the number of transformers to be purchased and the procurement budget. The documents include City Power’s report, “Progress on the Gauteng provincial Energy Programmes”.
20. “We used the progress report, compiled for the provincial government, to compare it with internal City Power documents, including the purchasing order and invoice we relied on for the published graphic. There were clear discrepancies between the provincial progress report and the payments made to MST, and we presented the information illustrating these discrepancies,” they submit.
21. The budget, according to provincial documents, was R32 million for the transformers. However, information from the law enforcement agencies involved in the criminal case against MST showed that the procurement’s initial quote was R18 million, but that the final payment exceeded R64.4 million.
22. Moreover, City Power’s quarterly reports were also used in reporting about MST. The quarterly performance reports are publicly available and are tabled at the Johannesburg Council every three months.
23. “It is the same performance reports we used to find that MST continues receiving contracts from the municipal entity. It is the entity’s own social media accounts that publish those assets where MST conducted maintenance, showing they continued to malfunction or experienced fire. The stories included the posts from City Power’s social media feed, showing blackouts the municipal entity said were caused by defects at power stations for which MST had received refurbishment contracts. All of this is public information that we scoured from the Council and City Power’s social media sites to compile the articles,” they submit.

Right of reply; denials recorded; public interest

24. News24 says it sent MST questions and recorded their denials of the allegations, including the threat of legal action – should it continue to write about the company.

Rejoinder

In general

25. MST basically reiterates its complaint. The company says the overall impression created is one of established guilt – the article implies wrongdoing on its part, “rather than providing a balanced view respecting [its] presumption of innocence” – which has infringed on its integrity, dignity and privacy, and has caused the company reputational harm.

Allegations presented as facts

26. MST contests the following “which are stated as matters of established fact” and which it says News24 proffered as part of its defence:

a. It conspired with City Power executives to defraud the Gauteng government;

b. Fani received an arrest warrant;

c. It had no money, capacity, or resources to deliver the infrastructure;

d. The contract “ballooned” from an initial R18 million quote to R64.4 million at the time of payment; and

e. The electrical devices purchased were never delivered.

   27. It submits, “When the surrounding narrative asserts that an active investigation has confirmed these facts, that an arrest warrant has been issued, and that Ms Fani herself conceded her company’s incapacity, no reasonable reader would understand this as a mere unproven allegation, which is precisely what clause 1.3 of the Press Code prohibits. The test under the Press Code is not whether the offending language was grammatically qualified. It is whether the article, read as a whole, conveys a false and prejudicial impression. On any objective reading, it does.”

Price inflation

28. MST “specifically and explicitly” denies News24’s contention that its allegations of price inflation are substantiated by City Power’s own documents, by provincial government reports, and by quarterly performance reports – it denies that it has performed any work in the specific locations cited by News24 (such as work in Bophelong, Orange Farm, Ivory Park, Snake Park and Braamfischervile). “This … is a denial that those documents correctly identify [MST] as the relevant service provider for those locations,” it argues.
29. The problem, MST submits, is that News24‘s response does not engage with this denial at all – instead, the article simply points to City Power’s documents as if those data were self-evidently correct and its own denial was self-evidently wrong. “This is not balanced reporting; it is the precise imbalance that the Press Code is designed to address.”
30. Moreover, a document from City Power alleging that MST supplied 81 transformers at R550 000 each “is not balanced merely because it is an official document”. Official documents can be wrong, incomplete, or deliberately falsified, particularly in the context of a corruption investigation. MST says its “denial of involvement with certain projects was a material piece of context that warranted prominent and substantive inclusion in the articles. Instead, Ms Fani’s denial occupied two sentences in an article of thousands of words”.
31. MST says the comparison between its charge of R550 000 per unit and the R91 844 per unit price sourced by News24 from “the market” is particularly unfair, inter alia because:

a. the article does not specify what “high-end transformers” it priced, from which suppliers they were sourced, at what capacity that has happened, and under what procurement conditions that took place;

b. industrial transformer pricing varies based on specifications, voltage rating, capacity, certifications, lead times, and whether the price includes installation, accessories, and decommissioning of existing units;

c. News24 is not a procurement expert, it does not commission a market analysis, and it does not put its specific comparative pricing exercise to it for comment before publishing it as evidence of inflation; and

d. the suggestion that the appropriate market price was R91 844 is not supported by any credible independent valuation and was presented as a factual finding, rather than a preliminary observation. “This selective, context stripped comparison created a false and misleading impression that the Complainant’s pricing was manifestly corrupt,” it concludes.

In conclusion

32. MST concludes that News24‘s response is characterised by a fundamental misreading of the complaint.
33. It says it does not dispute News24‘s right to report on the City Power investigation or that the case is in the public interest. What it does dispute, and what the Press Code prohibits, is the specific manner in which News24 reported on the complainant – “treating contested allegations as established facts, marginalising [MST’s] unequivocal denials, relying on arrest warrants and charge sheets whose legitimacy is now under official investigation for corruption, publishing fresh and amplified allegations without seeking a fresh right of reply, and creating the pervasive impression of proven guilt where none exists”.

Analysis

34. The salient aspects of the complaint are the following:

Treating contested allegations as established facts – thereby creating the false impression of ‘proven guilt’.

35. I cannot disagree more with MST on this issue. The headline was clearly cautiously worded – it states that the NPA was “investigating” matters (not “finding”) and the word “bribes” is used in inverted commas.
36. Moreover, the first three sentences of the article use the words “claims”, “apparently”, and “alleged interference”.
37. This trend is also apparent throughout the article – not once is an allegation stated as a fact. The article, from start to finish, consistently presents allegations as allegations.
38. Let me use only one sentence in the article to show just how cautious the journalist was to ensure that allegations remained as allegations and that they do not leave the impression of proven guilt: “According to seven sources in the NPA, the Hawks, and the police … Gauteng Hawks head Ebrahim Kadwa was alleged to have protected two senior provincial Hawks officers, who supposedly received cash bribes…” (My emphasis.)
39. I have no reason whatsoever to believe that a reasonable reader would have been left with the impression that MST was guilty.

Relying on documentation (arrest warrants and charge sheets) whose legitimacy is under official investigation for corruption

40. Under Point 28, MST “specifically and explicitly” denies News24’s contention that its allegations of price inflation are substantiated by City Power’s own documents, by provincial government reports, and by quarterly performance reports. “This … is a denial that those documents correctly identify [MST] as the relevant service provider for those locations,” it argues.
41. Under Point 30, this argument is further elaborated. MST states that the City Power document “is not balanced merely because it is an official document”. Official documents can be wrong, incomplete, or deliberately falsified, particularly in the context of a corruption investigation, it argues.
42. This is the point: If information in an official document is wrong, it is not the media’s fault. The role of the media is to report data in official documents that are in the public interest. This is exactly what has happened in this case.
43. I believe this is also why the newspaper cannot be faulted for reporting that warrants for arrests were issued and that prices were inflated.

Publishing fresh, amplified allegations without seeking a fresh right of reply

44. This part of the complaint does not hold water either. In previous articles, MST’s denials were recorded. In this article, it is reported that Tshifularo Mashava, the CEO, did not respond to questions. It is not possible to report a denial if it was not forthcoming.

Finding

45. The complaint is dismissed.

Appeals procedure

The Complaints Procedure stipulates that within seven working days of receipt of this decision, either party may apply for leave to appeal to the Chairperson of the SA Press Appeals Panel, Judge Bernard Ngoepe, fully setting out the grounds of appeal. He can be contacted at khanyim@presscouncilsa.org.za

Johan Retief

Acting Press Ombud

15 June 2026