Same firm, every seat: the Fairbridges map in UCT's Moshabela case (pt. 1) | Marika Sboros

Court papers in an extraordinary filing involving the University of Cape Town and its Vice-Chancellor, Prof Mosa Moshabela, lodged in the Western Cape High Court on August 5, 2026, reveal an unusually tangled arrangement. One prominent Cape Town law firm appears repeatedly in different capacities, at different points in the process now under challenge. A map of those appearances follows, drawn strictly by freelance investigative journalist Marika Sboros from the filed papers and the firm's own website. Nothing more.This piece is part 1 of a two-part series*.By Marika Sboros*.Fairbridges. Its name is rich with promise, almost an invitation to trust that things will be fair. It is no ordinary law firm.It is the firm principally involved in the extraordinary court filing, Moshabela v Council of the University of Cape Town (UCT), lodged in the Western Cape High Court on August 5, 2026.The court papers now on public record begin with the founding affidavit of the applicant, UCT’s Vice-Chancellor (VC) Prof Mosa Moshabela. It cites 36 respondents, including UCT, the Registrar, Council (its supreme governing body), Council Chair Adv Norman Arendse SC, and all 30 Council members.Reading the papers can feel like travelling down a “dark, desert highway” straight into the Karoo.By its own account, Fairbridges was established in Cape Town by John Merrington on November 6, 1812. That makes it Africa's first law firm, now in its 214th year. It was once the firm against which other South African law firms measured themselves.A law firm does not survive for 214 years by forgetting where the lines are. It survives by knowing them. Particularly the lines separating client, adviser and decision-maker, the person gathering evidence from the one weighing it.Among many questions the papers raise is one concerning precisely those lines. I’ve mapped them, room by room, through a remarkable architecture.The MapRoom one: attorneys for UCT – Fairbridges conducts correspondence for UCT under its own name throughout the record of Council’s involvement, including material letters to Moshabela’s attorneys dating back to March 2026.Its April 2, 2026 letter recorded that Moshabela would not be given the report eventually compiled for Council by its investigators into 34 alleged complaints against him by staff and students, despite Council stating that the report found no merit in any. And that before Moshabela could answer a single question on them. Room two: attorneys for UCT Council – Fairbridges also acts for UCT Council. That matters because Council’s resolutions of May 30, 2026 are among decisions now under scrutiny in the filing. So far, we have the firm acting for UCT and its governing body with boundaries between the rooms beginning to blur.Room three: assisting the investigators – Fairbridges’ letter dated June 24, 2026 records that Council appointed the firm “to assist the investigators in relation to matters arising from the investigation process”. The investigators were two senior counsel whose independence was central to the Council-led investigation.The firm acting for Council was therefore also assisting those independent investigators.Room four: investigators’ fees – Council’s February 14, 2026, resolution named two Fairbridges attorneys, either of whom was to “negotiate and agree with each investigator the financial terms and conditions of their appointment”.In plainer English, the firm assisting investigators was also the firm mandated to settle what those investigators would be paid.Room five: inside the investigation – Council’s February design reserved a place on the investigation team for an independent junior counsel. On March 14, Council “ratifies and appoints” Fairbridges managing director Adela Petersen to that position.Two words here do a remarkable amount of work. “Appoints” puts a director of the respondents’ own attorneys into the slot designated for independent junior counsel. “Ratifies” is retrospective. It means, by definition, that the appointment was approved after the fact.Petersen had clearly already been acting in the role before the instrument authorising her appointment.Room six: counsel advising the decision-maker – Council’s February resolution held that the investigators alone, at their initiative and during their investigation, could consult Adv Andrew Breitenbach SC. But Fairbridges’ April 9 letter records that Breitenbach attended Council’s March 14 meeting and advised, formulated and orally suggested wording for the resolutions Council should adopt.When Moshabela’s attorneys asked what instrument authorised this, Fairbridges’ June 24 answer was: “Everything Advocate Breitenbach SC has done in relation to this matter has been on our instructions.”The letter identified three sources of instruction: Fairbridges, UCT Registrar and, in relation to the investigators, the first Council resolution mandating the investigation. What it failed to identify was a Council resolution authorising Breitenbach to advise Council in its own deliberations.Room seven: the decision-maker’s pen – The April 9 letter records another pressing detail. Fairbridges associate attorney Jessica Jaftha, assisted by Petersen and Breitenbach, used Breitenbach’s handwritten notes to type up the wording of Council’s resolutions.When Moshabela’s attorneys raised the document’s provenance, Fairbridges disputed not what it showed but what it meant. Its response: "The fact that a document may reflect metadata identifying its drafter or editor does not establish procedural impropriety, self-appointment, want of independence, or any undisclosed conflict."On the same page, the firm added that “nothing establish(es) any actual conflict of interest” in Petersen’s involvement. Yet, the filing records a resolution of a public university’s governing body being formulated by counsel instructed by Fairbridges and typed by Fairbridges' attorneys. The map plots lines to doors opening to seven connected rooms leading to one firm..Read more:.Both sides now: UCT’s leadership crisis looking like a ‘hit job’?.Another buildingAn eighth room in a different building shows that Moshabela’s lawsuit is not the only High Court matter in which some of the same names recur.Court papers in the ongoing review of UCT’s adoption of its “Gaza resolutions” in June 2024, was brought by UCT professor of historical studies Adam Mendelsohn in August 2024. On Petersen’s affidavit, it shows that Fairbridges is attorney of record for UCT, and acts for Council and Arendse. Papers also show that Fairbridges serves as company secretary, with its director Marcus Shaefer in the position, to the Mauerberger Foundation Fund (MFF). MFF chair and managing director, Dianna Yach, sits on UCT Council and is cited among its members in that review.Published reports record that when two MFF directors went to the High Court in April 2026 seeking to have Yach declared a delinquent director, Schaefer filed sworn evidence in Yach’s support. That raises a separate legal question. Section 88 of the Companies Act is clear on the duties of a company secretary. These run to the company, not to any individual director. Two complaints by MFF directors against Fairbridges are now before the Legal Practice Council on that score. They remain allegations, open and undetermined. That leaves a different building with the same architecture. It adds more pieces to an increasingly familiar picture of an office created to serve an institution while appearing on one side of a dispute within that institution.Respondents’ own linesThe lines this map traces in Moshabela’s lawsuit are vital because they are not his invention or mine in reporting them. They come strictly from the respondents’ own instruments.UCT Council’s February resolution made the investigators independent. Council confined Breitenbach’s consultancy to the investigators, at their initiative, during the currency of their investigation. Council’s February design reserved the assistance slot for an independent junior counsel.Nobody outside UCT imposed those separations. Council itself chose them as the architecture for a process directed at UCT’s Vice-Chancellor.The papers then show the separations being closed, one by one, through appointment, ratification and instruction. Evidence-gathering, advising, drafting, paying and defending eventually run through one address.The architecture was drawn into the resolutions. Then, as court papers contend, it was dissolved in practice.What the papers don’t sayThis is where the legal brakes need to be applied. The founding affidavit does not seek relief against Fairbridges or Breitenbach. It makes no personal complaint against Petersen and seeks no finding against her. It does not accuse the investigators of dishonesty, bad faith or actual prejudgment. Nor does it make a complaint against Jaftha.Those distinctions matter. A person can be entirely honest and still find themselves occupying a legally problematic arrangement.The affidavit’s complaint is directed at the architecture of Council’s case against Moshabela, specifically, whether the resolutions adopted in these circumstances were the product of Council’s own independent deliberation, as a governing body’s resolutions must be in law.The recurrence of one firm’s name across seven rooms is documentary fact. What that recurrence did to the independence of the process is the question now before the court.Questions unansweredThe map turns into a lawsuit because of what happened when the applicant’s lawyers asked fairly straightforward questions leading to the main question. Moshabela’s attorneys asked, in a series of letters, for the instrument conferring on Breitenbach any authority beyond clause 3.4. No instrument was produced.They asked who presided over, introduced, directed or facilitated Council’s meeting of May 30, 2026. That’s a question of fact. It should have a short answer. Fairbridges declined to answer.Moshabela’s attorneys asked for particulars of every consultant and assistant involved in the investigation. Fairbridges declined to provide any.They asked two questions about timing – of when the investigators first learned of the “Forest Hill” incident that has featured prominently in press reports and when the officer concerned was interviewed. Fairbridges declined to answer.Moshabela’s attorneys asked for an undertaking that their correspondence, including the letters raising these concerns, would be placed before Council. Fairbridges replied that “(n)o undertaking is given in this regard.”Question after question touching the architecture of the case against UCT’s VC was met with silence, generality or refusal. Meanwhile, the resolutions created within that architecture continue to operate against one man only.The questions were quiet. The silence around them was not.214 yearsIn the end then, does Fairbridges’ age matter? Yes. Not because longevity proves anything about what happened here. It plainly does not. It matters because a firm practising for 214 years should not need the lines explained to it. It makes the accumulation of all these details more interesting than any one of them.The old Eagles song of the 1970s about a “dark desert highway” ends at a rather strange hotel. Everyone who knows the song knows the plot. Getting into the hotel is easy enough; getting out is another matter.Fairbridges has checked into these seven rooms through Council’s own instruments of appointment, ratification and instruction. It may yet argue its way to the front desk. The file is public now, and the leading question it creates is not going away. It is going straight to court.Under Rule 53 of the High Court’s Uniform Rules, UCT Council must now produce the record of its decisions. That means the minutes, attendance registers, instructions and drafts, including the document properties in which some of this story first became visible.Those records should show who was in the room when Council resolved against its own Vice-Chancellor, who formulated what its members adopted and on whose instructions. The record will either dissolve the pattern traced by the annexures or complete it.Africa’s first law firm has spent two centuries learning where the lines are. The High Court is now going to find out where, exactly, those lines led and who led them there.*Part Two will cover further allegations of conflicts of interest involving Fairbridges and UCT’s governance procedures in an unrelated incident that has led to a PAIA (Protection of Access to Information Act) request to UCT and a complaint lodged against it with the Information Regulator.*Fairbridges MD Adela Petersen was emailed questions for comment. She said it would “not be appropriate” to comment publicly on the merits of the litigation or issues “properly for the Court to determine”. She gave general comment to avoid “any misunderstanding about Fairbridges’ role”.Fairbridges did not accept that its functions were “inconsistent with the independence required of the investigation” and rejected the suggestion that it occupied overlapping roles compromising the process’s independence. The firm was UCT and/or Council’s legal adviser, providing legal and procedural assistance at various stages of the Moshabela matter – a role that did not make it the decision-maker or give it the “investigative function entrusted to the independent investigators.”.Read more:.What lies behind UCT’s battlefield against ‘pesky’ Jews?: Marika Sboros.The investigators “determined the course of the investigation and were responsible for reaching their own findings and conclusions”, Petersen said. “Neither Fairbridges nor counsel briefed to provide the investigators with legal advice from time to time … determined the investigators’ findings.”Legal advice on terms of appointment of independent professionals, remuneration, the legal framework governing a process, and the formulation of resolutions did not, without more, compromise “the independence of the professionals involved or of the process”.Fairbridges engaged Adv Andrew Breitenbach SC at UCT’s Interim Registrar’s request to advise Council and its sub-committees on legal and procedural issues, and to attend relevant meetings, Petersen said. Council “was and is entitled to obtain” legal advice when discharging its governance and fiduciary responsibilities, and to authorise the investigators to do likewise when necessary. Advice on the formulation and legal effect of resolutions did not convert counsel into a decision-maker. “Council remained responsible for its decisions, and for the resolutions it ultimately adopted.”Where questions put to her sought information on instructions to counsel, advice given by counsel or attorney-client communications, Petersen said those matters were privileged and could not be disclosed.She said that Fairbridges did not refuse to bring correspondence to Council’s attention. Correspondence from the Vice-Chancellor’s attorneys dated August 13 and 14 was placed before Council by the Registrar’s office and considered at the special meeting on August 15. As external legal adviser, Fairbridges said, it does not control the internal circulation of correspondence to Council members.Fairbridges had “at all times … sought to assist Council … lawfully, fairly, and in the best interests of (UCT)”, and was mindful that allegations concerning the process were now before the court and should be determined through the legal process, “not litigated through the media.”On whether Fairbridges would withdraw as UCT’s lawyers of record, given that two of its members may be required to depose to affidavits or give evidence, Petersen said Fairbridges and Breitenbach had jointly told Council on August 15 that new attorneys and counsel with “no involvement thus far” should represent it in the litigation.*Follow Marika Sboros on X and on Substack .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. 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Same firm, every seat: the Fairbridges map in UCT's Moshabela case (pt. 1) | Marika Sboros

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