SCA overturns Equality Court’s FIC ruling
The SCA has struck down a ruling that would have forced the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) to hand over a trove of confidential records to a group of bank customers who joined Iqbal Survé and the Sekunjalo group’s wider court battle over banks shutting their accounts.
The group, which included Siphokazi Ndudane, a former official of the then-Department of Agriculture, Forestry & Fisheries, and the late trade unionist Dennis George, won an Equality Court order in 2024 directing the FIC to hand over information they said could help show they had been unfairly discriminated against by some of SA’s biggest banks.
Both had their bank accounts shut after banks cited risk or compliance concerns.
News24 reports that the original order, handed down by Judge Daniel Thulare in the Equality Court in February 2024, covered bank risk documents and suspicious transaction reports.
Thulare found that the information could help test the applicants’ claim that banks had treated them differently from other companies implicated in wrongdoing.
He said non-disclosure would ‘allow the foul smell of racism and white superiority to linger around major banks in the republic’.
The FIC appealed, and the SCA has now overturned Thulare’s ruling.
It found that Ndudane and the others had sought an ‘overbroad order’ and were effectively ‘fishing for information to which they did not establish a right’.
‘They persuaded the Equality Court to accede to this relief, resulting in a judgment which is legally untenable.’
News24 notes that the SCA ruling notes that the applicants ‘abandoned’ the disclosure order in February 2025, when the appeal process was already under way.
However, the FIC, Nedbank and Absa pressed ahead.
The SCA said the ruling remained on the books and could affect future cases.
The appeals court did not rule that the applicants, or anyone else, could never obtain confidential FIC information.
Rather, it found that the applicants had not established a legal right to the specific information they wanted.
The judgment explicitly says FIC information is not immune from court-ordered disclosure in an appropriate case.
Article disclaimer: While we have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this article, it is not intended to provide final legal advice as facts and situations will differ from case to case, and therefore specific legal advice should be sought with a lawyer.
