Sunday Times stands by state capture story

In our effort to ensure that whatever we publish is accurate and true‚ we subject all our stories to a system of checks and we ascertain that they meet our criteria‚ standard and requirements prescribed by our code‚ internal policies and the press council’s code of ethics.

We applied these standards and checks to our front-page lead on January 28 2018.

As the editor‚ I was satisfied that our lead met the prescribed criteria and requirements.

We relied on interviews conducted with and documents provided to us by senior prosecutorial officials. The primary source document was identified to us as an indictment from the prosecuting authorities.

The content and processes emanating from this document were confirmed by other senior officials in the police and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).

We have no reason to believe that we were misled‚ fed wrong documents or that our sources had sinister‚ personal motives.

Given their seniority‚ the independent verification with other officials not linked to our primary sources‚ the communication channel they used to transmit the documents‚ we were satisfied that we can identify the document as an indictment and attributable to the NPA.

In hindsight we should not have identified it as a finalised indictment as it is yet to be signed by the NDPP. We however have no doubt that the document we used emanated from the NPA and is an official document.

We were neither aware nor suspected that the document is identical to the DA’s document.

Had it come to our attention at the time that the indictment sent to us was identical to the one drafted by the DA‚ we would have nevertheless published the story. But we would have treated it differently after interrogating these officials regarding the origin and status of the document and the reason for using it as their official document.

Bongani Siqoko

Editor: Sunday Times