More and more commissions of inquiry are looking into allegations of corruption in SA — and the law needs to take its course so those who are found guilty are held to account for what they have done.
But what happens to those of us who are cleared of wrongdoing? At first I thought I was one of the lucky ones. It took just six months for a commission of inquiry with full legal authority to clear my name and declare that all allegations made against me were unfounded. This was accompanied by a full lifestyle audit by a reputable audit firm which found no impropriety.
But I soon found that I couldn’t simply move on with my life, and my career became hamstrung by unfounded allegations that are continuously rehashed in the media to this day. Anyone can simply dredge up unfounded allegations in newspapers and social media, without verifying the outcomes of these legal processes. Often there is no justification for why the writer needs to repeat these allegations, or even an explanation that they were false.
That’s what happened recently when the story was published about the suspension of the COO of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), SA’s largest state-owned asset manager which oversees an estimated R2.3-trillion in state employees’ pension funds (“PIC refuses to give details on Vuyani Hako’s suspension”, June 2).
Imagine my shock when — despite the fact that three years had lapsed since my own PIC-related incident, I no longer serve on the board of that organisation and...
University of Rochester Medical Center and a former pathologist resolved a retaliation suit alleging URMC violated the False Claims Act by firing her for calling attention to federal grant fraud. ...