In the early hours one night in mid-February 2017, a Standard Bank foreign exchange salesman by the name of Bryan Brownrigg got a call from the bank’s head of global markets, Andy Hall.
“I’d been at a client dinner and was coming down William Nicol Drive in an Uber on the way home when Andy said to me: ‘Listen, when you wake up tomorrow, you’re going to be all over the news,’” Brownrigg tells the FM this week.
Despite the fact that it was 2am, Hall invited him over and laid out the story: the Competition Commission had lodged a case against 18 banks for rigging the rand-dollar exchange rate. All South Africa’s major banks were named, including Brownrigg’s employer, as well as foreign giants including JPMorgan, Barclays and Credit Suisse.
It was a sensational claim: the banks had conspired to rig the rand, one of the most widely traded emerging-market currencies in the world, in which about $26bn trades every day. The conspiracy had a “substantial effect” in the country, where buyers of rands would pay “artificially inflated prices for buying the currency”, the commission said.
And there, in the middle of the 76-page complaint, it named Brownrigg, accusing him of conspiring with a Barclays trader named Peter Taylor to fix the price of the rand. The “evidence” was a chat group transcript, which the commission claimed was a “manifestation of the broader agreement, arrangement [or] collusive practice between bank traders”.
Brownrigg thought he had somehow stumbled into the twilight zone.
For a start, he had never been a foreign exchange trader; he was a salesperson, whose job it was to call clients such as Barclays and discuss what rate he could get for them. He could never have influenced the trading price of foreign exchange even if he had wanted to.
The way it works is that a client such as Barclays would call Standard Bank and ask someone like Brownrigg what sort of rate it could get to buy, say, $100m, which differs from the rate for buying $1m. “You can’t manipulate the spread,” says Brownrigg. “If you don’t like my price, you need to go somewhere else.”
As it was, the chat transcript showed nothing more than Barclays asking for a price to buy currency from someone whose job it is to sell that currency. It was the sort of deal that gets made thousands of times a day across the world.
But Brownrigg wasn’t prepared for becoming the face of a currency-rigging racket.
“It was a massive shock. My reputation just went down the drain immediately,” he says. “In a sales job, your biggest asset is the trust your clients have in you, and if you lose that, you lose your job.”
Within days, he was a central figure in the rand-rigging news reports.
“Rate-rigging traders still at work” read one headline, marvelling at how Brownrigg hadn’t been suspended. Elsewhere, newspapers ran false front-page headlines like “Trillions lost in rand rigging”, riling up a mob predisposed to despise banks.
Standard Bank investigated and found nothing. Brownrigg says the bank was unequivocal: we’ll back you 100%, provided nothing incriminating comes out.
It took a huge toll. “My mother still hasn’t got over this. She got to the golf course one day and one of the ladies said to her: ‘Is your son going to jail?’ This devastated her,” he says.
His daughter was grilled at school too. “The other kids said to her: ‘I believe your dad has been stealing money.’ Now, no-one really knows what currency trading is, so I sat the family down and explained it to them. But this hung over us. It never went away.”
Brownrigg had worked for 23 years, building a network of clients to become one of the bank’s most valuable employees. Suddenly, those clients were thinking twice.
“My biggest client, who I first worked with years ago in London, said to me: ‘I’m sorry, Bryan, I just can’t deal with you any more until this is sorted out,’” he says.
For years, the accusations hung over him, stalling his career. For someone in his early 40s, in the prime of his working life, the stain prevented him from looking for alternatives.
“In banking, the way you often progress is to switch banks, but no-one would touch me. One Google search would have ended any interview. Standard Bank was hugely supportive, but this whole ordeal robbed me of any options I had,” he says.
Top court rips commission
Revelations that South Africa’s banks had been in on an immense conspiracy were seized on by those suspicious of capital to begin with.
In 2023, minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said the ANC government believed “the performance of the economy and the performance of the rand have been manipulated by the private sector, which has no interest in the development of this country”.
She accused the banks of wanting to “make sure that the government collapses”.
It made for neat political theatre. But in the background, it was all falling apart.
In the Competition Appeal Court in January 2024, judge Dennis Davis dismissed the case against 23 of the 28 banks, saying the commission provided no evidence that they were all part of a “single overarching conspiracy”.
Davis pointed out the commission’s schoolboy errors and said its argument on Standard Bank “does not get out of the legal starting blocks”. He pointed out that Brownrigg was not a trader, and no case was made as to why his chat wasn’t just a “normal conversation in the ordinary course of forex dealing”.
Yet the commission appealed Davis’s ruling to the Constitutional Court. At the end of June, it got the bad news — the country’s highest court was just as unimpressed.
In a 133-page judgment, Constitutional Court justice Owen Rogers said there had never been “plausible evidence” for adding several banks to the charge sheet. This ended the case for all but five banks — Investec, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, HSBC and Standard Americas — which may still have a case to answer.
On Brownrigg, the Constitutional Court was astounded that the commission had persisted, saying it could have found out the truth years before had it made “basic inquiries with Standard Bank”.
Analysts were brutal.
Bongane Sibanyoni, legal strategist for civic organisation CountryDuty, said: “The bulk of the case against most of the implicated banks ends not with a finding that they did not collude, but with the finding that the regulator’s papers were not good enough to make them answer for it.”
What makes the commission’s bungling so much worse is that there actually was a case for some banks to answer.
Evidence had first emerged in the US, where Jason Katz, a currency trader who had worked in several banks, including Barclays and BNP Paribas, pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court in January 2017. Other traders followed, with one being jailed.
Had South Africa’s commission mounted a tight case based on this evidence, it might have prevailed. Instead, it overreached, trying to shoehorn every bank in the country into its “overarching conspiracy”, based on vague inferences.
Ironically, Brownrigg resigned two weeks before the Constitutional Court ruling.
“The plan was to take some time off. When that ruling came out, I hadn’t expected to feel the relief I did. But after nine years, a weight I didn’t know was there lifted. I really couldn’t have done this without my wife’s support,” he says.
Standard Bank CEO Sim Tshabalala says Brownrigg went through hell for years. “He was miscast, both in fact and in law. And all that needed to have happened was, right in the beginning, the commission could have spoken to us. We tried to tell them from day one they had it wrong, but they were having none of it,” he tells the FM.
Tshabalala says, however, that had it found any evidence implicating any employees, it would have acted quickly, as it has done in the past.
“We run our business based on trust — we advance loans and take deposits and rely on people trusting us. So when an organ of state bases its actions on the basis that we’re not trustworthy, it’s worrying to us.”
Trust issues
Critics say this dismal finding, after more than a decade, underscores how public trust in the competition authorities, once globally admired, is badly shaken.
After the Constitutional Court ruling, the commission’s only response was a bizarre statement two weeks later, in which it failed to engage with the criticism. Instead, it said the ruling “clarifies legal and procedural principles, which the commission has to take into account when prosecuting international or cross-border cartels”.
Glossing over the implosion of the guts of its case, it instead lauded the fact that it can still proceed against Investec, JPMorgan Chase, Standard Americas, HSBC and BNP Paribas.
Heather Irvine, a respected competition lawyer from Bowmans, says this case isn’t an exception.
“That is just one example of the cartel division’s unreasonable approach,” she tells the FM. “The commission refers vague and unsubstantiated complaints and refuses to lay out all of the facts and evidence on which they are based, and companies end up having to litigate for years to understand the case they have to meet.”
And it drags on. Irvine says the commission uses its extensive investigative powers to conduct dawn raids — then sits on the mountains of data for ages.
This appears to be what happened with glass companies Glasfit and PG Glass.
A decade ago, in March 2016, the commission conducted a dawn raid, accusing them of having secret agreements dating back to 2004 to manipulate the cost of windscreens. Yet only this year did it refer the case to the Competition Tribunal.
It doesn’t help that the commission seems allergic to accountability.
For weeks, the FM tried to secure an interview with commissioner Doris Tshepe to discuss these issues. Last week, Tshepe said she was not available for an interview but would answer written questions by the weekend.
On Saturday, however, Tshepe’s office said she couldn’t do this, since she is “constrained by a number of pressing commitments, including a family bereavement, and is therefore unable to engage fully with the questions at this stage”.
This appears to run counter to the lip service given in its annual report, where it commits to providing “timely and accurate information” to the media.
Yet in the commission’s last report for 2025, Tshepe gives a glowing account of her work, without once mentioning the banks inquiry. Instead, she boasts of “significant strides through enforcement, merger regulation, market inquiries and advocacy”.
On the face of it, the numbers do look impressive. The commission met all its targets for the 330 mergers it investigated, concluding the easier cases within 14 days on average and the large mergers within 76 days on average, far better than the 120-day “standard”.
It also boasts that its interventions have delivered fabulous dividends.
For instance, four “development funds” created in the farming sector due to conditions stipulated in takeovers by brewer AB InBev, beverage giants PepsiCo and Coca-Cola and paper company Mondi have since disbursed R1.3bn to 1,009 people and funded 331 small businesses.
“Participating farmers increased employment levels with 915 jobs, which is attributed to interventions by the development funds. Moreover, the study found that employment levels were likely to be sustainable in the long run and were not short-lived,” it says.
Which shows the good that the commission can do — just as the banks case shows what can go appallingly wrong.
Sadly, the problems aren’t confined to the commission. The problems at the Competition Tribunal — the authority that decides on whether to prosecute cases brought to it by the commission and gives the green light to mergers — may go even deeper.
Trials at the tribunal
There is no matter that better exemplifies the debacle at the Competition Tribunal than the cartel case involving steelmaker Cape Gate, which makes long steel products at its factory in Vanderbijlpark.
Back in 2009, the commission accused Cape Gate, ArcelorMittal, Columbus Stainless and Scaw of operating a cartel to fix scrap-metal prices between 1998 and 2008. While ArcelorMittal and Columbus settled and Scaw got leniency for co-operating, Cape Gate opted to fight.
Finally, in 2019, the tribunal heard the case — then went quiet for six years. It was only in August 2025 that it found against Cape Gate, a ruling which the company promptly appealed to the Competition Appeal Court.
In June this year, the appeal court issued a ruling that, if anything, was worse than the Constitutional Court judgment in the banks matter.
Judges Mokgere Masipa and James Lekhuleni accused the tribunal’s panel of acting in a way that is “offensive to the constitution”, while the six-year delay was a “serious dereliction of duty” which “cannot be deprecated strongly enough”.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. In the tribunal’s affidavits, it justified the delay by saying this was because an employee, Busisiwe Masina, had informed the panel that “settlement” discussions were taking place between Cape Gate and the commission.
The Competition Appeal Court declared this to be “false” and “not borne out by the evidence”. As a result, it agreed with the claim that the panel “acted either in reckless or deliberate disregard of the truth” in making this argument.
The FM has now obtained further evidence from a whistleblower which confirms that the tribunal’s chair, Mondo Mazwai, was told by Masina that this excuse wasn’t true weeks before the appeal court hearing, yet failed to inform the court.
On February 2, Masina wrote an e-mail to Mazwai saying she was “very concerned” about the affidavits filed by the tribunal. “It casts aspersions on me regarding the delay in drafting the reasons,” she said, denying that she had ever told anyone of “settlement” talks.
“The timeline of events, both before and, I believe, after my departure from the tribunal, will show that never happened,” she wrote. “Quite frankly, I am most surprised and disheartened that it appears that I am being used as a scapegoat.”
As the whistleblower tells the FM, it is not material whether Masina was right or wrong but that the letter was “not disclosed to the Competition Appeal Court, to Cape Gate or to Cape Gate’s legal representatives at any point in the litigation”.
One of Cape Gate’s former lawyers confirms as much. “Not once did anyone ask us if there were settlement talks taking place,” they say.
In a response to the FM’s questions, Mazwai, an admitted attorney, says it is “incorrect that Ms Masina was being used as a scapegoat”. But she says that since the commission has appealed the appeal court ruling to the Constitutional Court, “it would be inappropriate in the circumstances to engage with the media on [these] issues”.
She did not answer why she didn’t disclose this letter to the appeal court.
Mystifyingly, the Competition Commission has now appealed this ruling to the Constitutional Court. As one legal expert wryly says: “It would be unprecedented for the Constitutional Court to uphold a ruling in which there was dishonesty.”
Mazwai has been a member of the tribunal since 2013, after a long career in various private law firms. But her leadership has drawn acid criticism from trade union Nehawu.
The union last year wrote to trade, industry & competition minister Parks Tau, detailing an exodus of employees because of Mazwai’s leadership style, which it says extends to bullying and intimidation, sparking panic attacks and depression.
One staff member, speaking to the FM anonymously for fear of reprisal, describes Mazwai’s tenure as a reign of terror. “Numerous employees and tribunal members have left, citing bullying, harassment and an oppressive management culture,” the staff member says.
Mazwai tells the FM that she is aware of these claims, and the tribunal has taken steps to fix this, “including initiating and progressing a process to appoint a workplace culture specialist”.
Delays, delays, delays
The Cape Gate case, however, is symptomatic of a wider problem: the length of time taken to green-light cases.
Irvine attributes a large part of these delays to capacity issues at the tribunal.
“It has been hugely underresourced for some time. It is limping along with only two full-time panel members and it is unclear why Tau hasn’t appointed more people to expand this capacity,” she says.
The delays assumed sharp relief in Vodacom’s R13.2bn bid to buy 30% of fibre company Maziv, which was first announced in 2021. After that, it took the commission 19 months to recommend blocking the deal, which the tribunal agreed with.
At the time, Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub described this as a travesty, saying: “We would not look at other [deals] given that we don’t want to be stuck in the competition authorities for another three years.”
Vodacom’s deal was salvaged only after Tau filed an appeal against the tribunal, arguing that it be allowed.
Finally, in November 2025, the Competition Appeal Court gave it the green light, after Vodacom promised all sorts of things, including providing free fibre to schools, clinics and police stations and that it would spend R60bn on upgrading its network.
Irvine says the delays in these deals are a massive handbrake on the economy.
“This is an administrative body that sits at the heart of South Africa’s process of attracting investment, and yet it continues to stymie dealmaking — and there’s no reason for it,” she says.
Mazwai, however, tells the FM that this criticism is “not supported by actual merger statistics”.
She says that in the year to March, the tribunal decided on 101 merger applications, approving them all, with conditions attached to 26. All 101 merger decisions were issued within 10 days of the hearing.
In cases where the tribunal heard a case that had been referred by the commission, 99% of them took place within 10 days of that referral.
In 87% of cases, the tribunal provided reasons for its decisions within 20 business days. Where it took longer, Mazwai says this was because the cases were complicated by complex legal or economic issues.
“The record shows a tribunal that is dealing with its merger workload quickly, meeting the overwhelming majority of its performance targets, while also confronting increased demand and complexity of cases, with finite capacity,” she says.
As for the criticism that too many cases are being overturned on appeal, demonstrating that the wrong decisions had been taken, she says the appeal system is a sign of a “robust” competition system.
“As the statistics show, the majority of cases are not appealed. Appeals form part of a built-in system of judicial oversight,” she says.
But she does agree that the tribunal operates “under severe capacity constraints”, with just 28 staff members. This hampers its ability to process cases efficiently.
Competition outlier
Still, executives canvassed for this article tell the FM they have become wary of how unpredictable the authorities have become.
“We were in advanced discussions to invest heavily in South Africa,” says one, who asked to remain anonymous as he is still dealing with the authorities. “We didn’t go ahead for a variety of reasons, but it was the intervention of the commission that was the final nail in the coffin.”
While he supports a regulator that strengthens competition, it saps a huge amount of time. “There is no country where this isn’t a factor, but here in South Africa, the amount of time diverted from operating your business is extraordinary,” he says.
It’s a common complaint: the commission is too interventionist, seeking to wield competition policy to achieve what the government has been unable to elsewhere.
In particular, critics say a rising risk is the unpredictable way in which the tribunal can block a takeover if it deems it doesn’t serve the “public interest”.
What happened in cases like Walmart’s R16.5bn purchase of Massmart in 2011, or AB InBev’s purchase of SABMiller in 2016, is that the tribunal approved the deals subject to specific conditions.
Last year, conditions were imposed in 122 of 330 mergers — rules that typically prohibit retrenchments or specify a minimum level of black shareholding.
The commission said these conditions resulted in a “net saving of 7,467 jobs”, obliged parties to sell shares to black shareholders worth an estimated R266m in 13 cases, and in 14 other cases created employee share ownership schemes worth R1.2bn.
The commission would argue that this shows that the “public interest” conditions work.
Chris Abrahams, an acting regional magistrate in Colesberg, wrote in the legal publication De Rebus in March that South Africa’s muscular approach to “public interest” means the country is an outlier in global competition law.
“It is one of the only countries where a merger can be approved, blocked or heavily conditioned solely on public interest grounds, even when there is no harm to competition,” he said. “This places it somewhere between competition policy and industrial policy.”
Abrahams doesn’t see a problem with this, though it means that lawyers now know that any takeover deal will likely include rules on keeping jobs, buying from local suppliers and transformation.
Irvine says these public interest elements are becoming more common globally.
“Many countries are moving towards doing similar things. And it makes sense: if a foreign power or hostile corporate actor wanted to buy Transnet, you would want to have the ability to block a deal on public interest grounds. But my worry is that the conditions are often not merger-specific or proportional,” she says.
As it is, most South African companies would probably accommodate this broad approach to competition law; what they cannot handle are unpredictable or irrational interventions that turn the marketplace into treacle.
Take Cape Gate. Now that the commission has appealed the Competition Appeal Court ruling, the steelmaker must relitigate a case from 2008.
But if the commission wins, it would be hard-pressed to prove a case dating back to a time when Thabo Mbeki was still president — especially given its recent record on the banks.
For Steven Good, a lawyer who is also one of Bryan Brownrigg’s oldest friends, the commission’s single-minded pursuit of the banks blinded it to other areas of the economy in need of intervention.
“There is a huge opportunity cost when the commission pursues so relentlessly a case that is so flawed. It could be finding real collusion happening in the economy. It could be doing real good. Instead, it is doubling down on things like this,” he says.
Good says it has been “desperately sad” to watch this ordeal play out for years. Institutions like the commission wield huge power, he says, but when they proceed based on a long-held narrative rather than facts, “innocent bystanders like Bryan can pay an enormous personal price”.
Perhaps surprisingly, Brownrigg still has a high regard for the role that a watchdog like the Competition Commission can play in the South African economy.
“There are a lot of cases where the commission has done very well, and we need these people in the country to keep everyone in check,” he says. “But it seems there are occasions, especially lately, where they’re getting it very wrong.”
For a critical institution that’s meant to ensure economic efficiency and prevent small businesses from being stomped on, South Africa can ill afford to let this continue.
