The biggest story for South Africa’s Competition Commission last year was not related to enforcement or merger reviews. In October, Commissioner Shan Ramburuth was forced to resign after a government-commissioned investigation revealed that he had watched pornography on a work trip and expensed it to the state. “The whole episode was so distasteful,” says one lawyer. Distasteful not simply for the behaviour in question – Ramburuth has maintained the incident was an accident and offered to repay the money – but for the manner in which the story was exposed via the Sunday papers. Ramburuth was known to have fallen out with the economic development minister Ebrahim Patel, as well as a number of his staff, and his ousting is viewed as a particularly humiliating way to achieve a political objective.
