Listen here.Bryan Brownrigg was never a currency trader. He sold foreign exchange to Standard Bank's institutional clients for 23 years. But when the Competition Commission decided that 28 banks had run a single conspiracy to rig the rand, his name went into the complaint anyway, and it took a decade and a Constitutional Court ruling to get it out again. Financial Mail editor Rob Rose told Alec Hogg how one wrong assumption metastasised into a case that dragged banks, courts and taxpayers through ten years of litigation, and why Brownrigg is only one entry on a longer list. A tribunal sat on a merger decision for six years and then gave a reason for the delay that turned out not to be true. A R14 billion Vodacom fibre deal collapsed. A black-owned retailer was blocked from selling its own business. Rose's argument is blunt: South Africa's competition watchdogs have stopped policing competition, and started doing something else..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Edited transcript of the interview.Alec Hogg: Well, it's so good to be talking to Rob Rose again, the editor of the Financial Mail. How's it going there, Rob? I know we haven't had a chance to chat for a while. You've been putting together different publications, and it looks like things are getting better. The Financial Mail's got a whole new lease of life. We're going to be talking about the cover story you had last week, because it is particularly well written by you. But how's the new world of being a fighting general, I suppose, with a huge amount of responsibilities on top of it?Rob Rose: I mean, it's fun. We've merged Currency, Financial Mail and Miningmx into one. So the idea is to create this hub of, I wouldn't say brand name journalists, but people who've done a lot in journalism and achieved a lot. And, you know, it's fun. That's the thing about it, Alec. It's a lot like your business and my business. We became journalists because we enjoy the business of journalism. We're just editing platforms now, but the point is, we're journalists, and we love that. Which is why I loved writing this story. It's great to go and speak to people. And I think you see a lot of editors, and business media people I suppose, lose touch with it when they stop speaking to people. That's important, that's what you and I do. Our job is to not just take off exposition, but speak to people, have our minds open to particular circumstances through the stories we write. It's the whole show, don't tell, thing. You speak to enough people and the story writes itself, I suppose.Alec Hogg: Yeah, it certainly does. And this is a cracker. I know it'll be off the shelves soon because you're still weekly, but Bryan Brownrigg from Standard Bank. It was instructive to me because we've been doing quite a lot of work recently on overreach by regulators, whether it's Swimming South Africa, or the people within different organisations. There was a medical body, which Marika Sporos wrote a lot about. The overreach seems to just be taking off. But this, about the Competition Commission, is like in a different league. Just tell us the story of Bryan Brownrigg.Rob Rose: Yeah. So I thought it was fascinating to find somebody whose life had actually been affected by regulatory overreach. What happened is he was one of the victims of the Competition Commission's banks inquiry. This began in 2015, and there was actually a case to answer for some banks, because a couple of traders pleaded guilty in a New York court to trying to manipulate foreign exchange rates. At a very small margin, it's not going to move the currency, but it allows them to make a better position and get a bonus for it. So that's what the Competition Commission investigated. But then they overreached, and they tried to slam all 23, I think that actually extended to 28 banks in the country, claiming they were part of a single overarching conspiracy, which was itself a big claim to make. They couldn't prove it, ultimately. But in the process of trying to make this claim, and trying to force it through the courts over, you know, a decade essentially, people like Bryan Brownrigg were named as somebody who "rigged the rand," and his name made it into the headlines because it's Brownrigg, and, you know, it was an easy thing for people to do. But it wasn't true. The problem here is the Competition Commission hadn't even established what his job was. He wasn't a trader of the rand, he was a salesperson whose job was to speak to clients and say, get them the best rate for changing a million dollars or a hundred million dollars. It was never to trade the currency. So the Competition Commission got it drastically wrong. They named him in their first big complaint, and it led to problems. He told the story of how his mother was asked on the golf course, "I hear your son's going to jail." His child was teased at school. These kinds of things, incorrect in the notional premise in the first place, end up ruining people's lives. He'd worked as a salesperson for 23 years, and this was the thing that hung over him for nearly a decade. So I think it was a tangible example of what this kind of regulatory overreach, and just the Competition Commission not doing its job properly, has on people's lives. And Standard Bank said, ultimately, in their affidavit, that had the Competition Commission contacted them and asked before this, they would have told them this isn't the story. Instead, it had to go through the courts, it had to go through appeal courts. And even once the Competition Appeal Court had said Bryan Brownrigg wasn't involved, the Competition Commission still took it to the Constitutional Court, where it was then hammered a few weeks ago. So it was an example of exactly that. What happens when you get it so badly wrong as a regulator?Alec Hogg: Has he got a case against them? If this were the United States, you would certainly have some ambulance chasing lawyers on his case, saying, all of the pain you've suffered here in South Africa, is there a case for him?Rob Rose: It's a very difficult thing to do. I did ask him about that, and I think that for somebody who's been through this for a decade, I think they just often want to get out of it. I'm not sure if he's going to pursue something like that. I'm not sure if you can pursue something like that against a body like the Competition Commission. But the other thing we've seen is that when they've been found to be wrong, the Commission has then just appealed everything to the highest court. So you spend millions in legal fees. And part of what makes the Competition Commission case so worrying is that a number of their decisions have been found to be wrong. They've been appealed to the Appeal Court or the Constitutional Court, where they've been overturned. So the decisions were actually wrong, but they've spent millions in taxpayer money essentially fighting cases they shouldn't have fought. It's an illustration that the Competition Commission, which perhaps twenty years ago was doing the right thing, isn't doing that anymore.Alec Hogg: Be interesting to hear what David Lewis thinks about this. He had a good reputation when he was running the competition bodies. But Rob, it's not the only instance. And this is a big one, and somebody's life has been affected by it. But there were other examples, and I think we've even spoken about the Cape Gate story, which again was in this excellent piece of yours. Just refresh our memories there.Rob Rose: Yeah, so the Cape Gate case. The competition authorities are pretty much divided into two. You have the Competition Commission, that looks at whether there's a case to be made of anti-competitive conduct, and it then prosecutes the case at the tribunal, which is the ultimate jury that decides on this kind of thing. And also, every time you do a big merger or transaction, you have to go to the tribunal and get their sanction on whether it can proceed or not. So the tribunal is very powerful in terms of stopping corporate deal making. In this case, the Competition Commission decided, around 2015, to prosecute a case against Cape Gate and various metal producers over scrap metal fixing. Cape Gate fought them, and in 2019 they had a hearing at the tribunal. The decision just didn't come out for six years. It just languished somewhere in the Competition Tribunal's offices. And when Cape Gate asked about this repeatedly, the tribunal just said, well, it's in the process. Then they went to court, to the Appeal Court, and the tribunal said the reason they didn't release the decision is because they'd heard there was a settlement going on between Cape Gate and the Commission, which is just not true. It was factually not true. They just made it up. And I had correspondence from one of the whistleblowers in this case, who sent me internal emails where they told the chairperson of the tribunal, this just isn't true, and you shouldn't say this. And they still went to the Competition Appeal Court and didn't reveal that email, didn't reveal that the discussions were not true at all. I think that raises huge issues around the ethical standing of a major body in our country that can ultimately block mergers and block big deals. If they're behaving unethically in that respect, who's to say they're making the right decisions elsewhere? If you speak to competition lawyers, and to a lot of people who used to work at the tribunal and the Commission, versus the lawyers who work around there, I think they are themselves really scathing of what's happening at those two bodies, and the extent to which it's introduced sand into the machinery of our economy, so that nothing actually happens.Alec Hogg: How though? How were these people, who are now running the show clearly not very well, how were they injected into those positions?Rob Rose: Well, you had a situation like the current chairperson of the tribunal, where she was at the tribunal for a while, she was a private sector lawyer, and she was appointed to the tribunal by Ebrahim Patel, and has been there for a while. I understand it's very difficult. She answered our questions, which is more than the Competition Commission did. The Commission wouldn't answer our questions at all, and claimed there were family bereavements and this and that over many weeks, just avoided speaking to us, which I think is pretty poor accountability for an institution that should be accountable to the public. But at least the tribunal did answer our questions. They claimed there was no lying in that particular case, that they didn't lie, they disclosed what they should have. But they said there are real problems at the tribunal in terms of resources. There are only two full time panel members, and those panel members, as well as a few part time panel members, have to decide on every merger and transaction. So they're getting stuff wrong, partly it seems, because resources are so thin. They're not investigating properly. And for some bizarre reason, Parks Tau, the current Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, just hasn't appointed more people to that body, which is craziness. If you remove the competition block, and I spoke to somebody from a big multinational corporation who said they are not investing because they don't want to go through the rigours of the competition authorities, if you remove that blockage, you would have, well, it's all about, you know, President Ramaphosa speaks about reducing friction for business. This is a body that has absolutely created friction for business and absolutely shouldn't be doing that. We are meant to make our economy more competitive, more efficient, and we've just gone the other way. And I think that's what this particular story tried to show.Alec Hogg: Institutionalised accountability. It is something South Africa is really grappling with at the moment, as mentioned earlier, with a whole number of these issues. But it's almost like it's now starting to surface. Why would that be? Because it clearly hasn't just started in the last few years. It's been there for quite some time.Rob Rose: The notion of holding corporations and institutions of our public service accountable for their actions. I think, Alec, it's because we've seen a lot of court decisions recently where the courts have shone a light on just how bad it has been, and what has happened. These particular institutions are examples of it. And I think there's been the optimism of the early years of the post-apartheid era. I think even during the Thabo Mbeki era, we were quite naive about what's being done. You kind of expected people to just do their job. Then you had the coming down to earth during the Jacob Zuma years, and then the promise of Ramaphosa. And I think there's a greater scepticism now. We suspended our scepticism over these bodies for a long time. And I think now we realise things aren't being done unless we call them to account. I suppose it's difficult, because you've seen the media in a very difficult position, and the media was one of the institutions of governance, as Nicky Newton-King used to call them, responsible for calling these institutions to account. But with the media so afraid and barely able to do its job, I think institutions get away with murder. And you now have a very angry populace that is clearly going to go to the polls in November, and vote based on this. I think the demands for accountability from all our institutions, and a lack of faith in them to do their job, is what we see, I think, far more profoundly than in the past.Alec Hogg: I was thinking about this on a broader scale, and you did mention the Vodacom deal. Now that hasn't really hit the national consciousness, and it should. Just take us through that case study.Rob Rose: Yeah, that was a big case. Essentially, Vodacom wanted to buy Maziv, the fibre company that owns Dark Fibre Africa. What happened was the Competition Commission said no, you can't do this, because you're going to reduce competition in the fibre industry, and after that the tribunal agreed with it. It was strange, because in this particular case, Parks Tau actually appealed the competition decision and said, no, you've got to allow this. But at the time, the Vodacom CEO, Shameel Joosub, said, this is ridiculous, we're not going to do a big deal again in this country, because this is what happens: we have competition authorities making bizarre decisions like this, based upon nothing. They hadn't considered the real competition elements. And one of the issues getting in the way of many deals is there's a public interest clause. The tribunal can block a deal based on whether they think it serves the public interest or not. And it's the misapplication of that which has allowed the authorities to just wield power, in a sense, so that competition itself becomes irrelevant. It's whether you think it's going to help society, whether it is reducing black empowerment, which is what we initially saw with the Burger King deal. Essentially, they said Grand Parade Investments couldn't sell Burger King, because it would reduce black empowerment. These were black empowerment investors wanting to sell to other black empowerment investors, which was a ludicrous decision. They're making the wrong decisions, and for the wrong reasons. It's not about accountability, it's not about competition, it's about doing the bidding of politicians a lot of the time. And I think that's the worrying way in which our competition authorities are going. Now, a couple of the competition lawyers I spoke to said it's not unusual for countries to have public interest clauses, and that is what you see more and more. But in a sense, the real worry is that it's become unpredictable for companies. BHP, for example, tried to buy Anglo American, and then realised they just hadn't done the work of getting close to the politicians in this country. That's one of the reasons why BHP's bid for Anglo just died an early death: they didn't realise to what extent you have to show political fealty to the politicians in South Africa. And that's the disturbing thing, that you want a predictable regulatory environment, where you know we do this, we do that, and we can get a deal through. But now I think that's the thing that's pretty unclear at the moment.Alec Hogg: Sure. So the economic stakes are high, and they seem to be influenced overly by ideology, and the ideology of the ruling party. But could this all change with our political landscape, which does appear to be less determined by the ANC, and more a coalition, or at least a discussion of what is good for the country?Rob Rose: Yeah, I think absolutely that's changing. I spoke to David Masondo yesterday, the Deputy Minister of Finance, about the GNU, and whether it's introducing greater accountability. I think it has created a greater separation, which is necessary, between the ruling party and the government. Beforehand, what happened in the ANC made it into government policy. But now there's a sense of, you're a step removed from that. And you do have John Steenhuisen now, who is the Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, after the recent reshuffle requested by Geordin Hill-Lewis. So I think you have portfolio and cabinet accountability, to an extent you didn't have before. You don't just expect ANC policy to filter down directly into competition policy. But there's also a kind of administrative legacy, which is that a lot of people are appointed to positions based on their own ideology in important state institutions. So it's about reappointing the right people. It's about making sure that merit-based appointments in institutions are a real thing, and that people in these positions can do the job. There are people who could do the job at the tribunal and the Commission. But if you appoint the wrong people, then you're just wading through molasses, when you should have a frictionless economy to boost GDP. We saw GDP this week actually going negative. That's not the thing you can afford.Alec Hogg: You mentioned Steenhuisen with a sense of some optimism. Do you think he can make any difference, given the rough ride he was given at Agriculture?Rob Rose: I mean, that was a tough time for him at Agriculture, and I think a lot of the industry groups were very outspoken about how he handled that. But I think John Steenhuisen is an individual with some skills, and now some experience in government. And I also think he has a point to prove. So I don't think he's going to be a pushover in the DTIC, and that's a critical portfolio. Besides the competition element of it, you have tariffs, you have trade policy, you actually have the reinvigoration of our industry that depends on the DTIC. We talk about the deindustrialisation of the country, and that very much depends on what happens in Parks Tau's department. And Parks Tau's lack of attention on the Commission, I think, is a big red flag. But if someone like John Steenhuisen can redirect it, in a government sense, and say, look, we need to be doing the right things for the economy here, then that's a really positive thing. Alec, my predisposition is optimism until people show they mess up. So I would like to believe he's going to be able to push for it.Alec Hogg: Let's hope that he listens or watches, and actually takes the hint, and goes and knocks on Parks Tau's door and says, hey, I've got a new part of my portfolio I'd like to take care of. But Rob, from your perspective, just to close off with, you're a fighting general now, so you've got a heck of a lot, I know, as the editor in chief there, to take care of on a day to day basis. How long did it take you to put this piece together?Rob Rose: This took a few weeks. Actually, I've been working on it for months. Like I said, we spoke previously about the Cape Gate case. All of these things inform your reporting, I think. And what you want to do is touch on the bigger issues that really are affecting our economy. So it took a few weeks, and I spoke to quite a few people. Then I really thought it was important to speak to the people whose lives are impacted by this. So with Bryan Brownrigg, it took a while to get him to agree to speak about this, because he's been scarred by his media experience. But I do think, if you can personalise and show the impact of policy decisions on people's lives... you talk about a fighting general, that's what you and I like to do. So when you can actually draw attention to something, it's great to be able to put it out there.Alec Hogg: As always, it's been great talking to Rob Rose. He is the editor in chief of the Financial Mail Group. I'm Alec Hogg from BizNews.com.