Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba's bid to overturn a High Court judgment that found he had lied under oath in his legal battle with the Oppenheimer family failed in the SCA yesterday when the court dismissed his application for leave to appeal, saying there was no reasonable prospect of success, notes a BusinessLIVE report.

Judge Malcolm Wallis said ‘there is nothing to suggest that the issues raised by the Minister are of such a nature as to warrant the grant of leave to appeal’. The application was dismissed with costs. The Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) found in December 2017 that the Minister’s arguments in the matter were ‘disingenuous, spurious and fundamentally flawed, laboured and meritless, bad in law, astonishing, palpably untrue, untenable and not sustained by objective evidence, uncreditworthy and nonsensical’.

And in Gigaba's appeal in the same court, Judge Neil Tuchten found Gigaba had ‘deliberately told untruths under oath’ on facts that were central to the case.

Gigaba then approached the SCA and the Constitutional Court concurrently. However, earlier this month, the Constitutional Court dismissed the application with costs, saying it was not in the interests of justice to hear the matter at that stage because the SCA had to rule on the matter first.

Fireblade, the Oppenheimer’s aviation company, took Gigaba to court in 2016 after he rejected its application to operate a luxury international terminal at OR Tambo International Airport. The Oppenheimers accused Gigaba of reversing his approval under pressure from the Gupta family, exerted through the former chairman of Denel, Daniel Mantsha. Fireblade leases the terminal land from Denel, notes the report.

Full BusinessLIVE report

Minister of Home Affairs and Another v Fireblade Aviation Proprietary Limited and Others