The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Western Cape says it is observing the unfolding situation in the City of Cape Town following a raid on Friday at the offices of Mayco Members JP Smith and Xanthea Limberg.
Police say they are conducting further probes into housing tender fraud in the construction sector within the Cape Town municipality.
Smith is the Mayco member for Safety and Security in the city as well as deputy Federal Chairperson of the party’s national structure.
DA Western Cape leader, Tertius Simmers says while there is ample speculation, there is also a lot of vagueness around the matter.
Simmers says he also had a conversation with Smith, who gave his version of what transpired during the raid.
“The police did come, the document which they showed to his office staff was quite unclear to be quite honest. They just took random cellphones, laptops, documentation, some of those documentation was not even relevant apparently to what the document was there for, and he gave me a bit of background, you know, alleging that he was informed I believe, quite a few months ago.
They thought it was actually a hoax about what they were being told. And as such that hoax has now played itself out yesterday, so I think we will monitor this very closely and I do believe that JP will be obviously engaging his legal team going forward, which I do support him in because sadly in politics, when politics uses the apparatus of the state.”
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Simmers adds that the party will follow all internal processes before deciding on the way forward regarding Smith and Limberg.
“The party has internal processes. Those will only be initiated once we have the full content. After speaking to JP yesterday and to Helen [Zille] herself, it’s pretty much clear that circumstances, if you compare this one to what happened to Malusi Booi, are actually not the same. So we do need all the content before the party structures as a whole as the province, we do engage the federal structure pertaining to the relevant processes which is required.”