20 January 2026
Yet again a private company has used the courts to try to prevent the media from reporting news in the public interest. Illustration: Lisa Nelson
ProEthics has removed from the roll its urgent legal bid to “gag” GroundUp from reporting about ongoing investigations into a procurement contract the company had with the National Lotteries Commission (NLC).
The matter was set down on the urgent roll in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria on Tuesday. But on Monday, ProEthics had not yet filed its replying affidavit and had the matter removed from the roll. The case will now be set down for hearing on a later date.
GroundUp previously reported that ProEthics, which provides ethics training to government and large corporations, billed the NLC more than R28-million at a time when the NLC was overwhelmed with allegations of corruption, fraud and conflicts of interest.
Late last year, GroundUp journalist Raymond Joseph, who had uncovered evidence of systematic corruption and fraud in the NLC, sent ProEthics a list of questions relating to ongoing investigations and allegations against the company.
In response, ProEthics launched an urgent court application, seeking a pre-publication interdict to prevent publication. The case was set down for hearing on Tuesday, after GroundUp undertook to hold publication over until 20 January 2026.
In her founding affidavit, company CEO Dr Janette Minnaar said its contract with the NLC was lawful and carried out in terms of a service level agreement with strict confidentiality provisions.
She said a forensic investigation conducted by TSU Investigating Services between 2022 and 2023 into NLC expenditure had made no findings of criminal conduct against ProEthics.
She said previous GroundUp articles had caused immediate reputational harm and GroundUp had been required, following a complaint lodged with the Press Council of South Africa, to correct “misleading statements”.
But notwithstanding this, Minnaar said, the damage had been done, and in March 2025, the South African Reserve Bank pulled out of planned ethics training, citing “negative media coverage”.
In December 2025, Joseph had sent 14 questions to the company. These reflected that he was writing an article on the assumption that ProEthics had received fees it was not entitled to, that there were imminent civil proceedings to recover this money, that the company had been implicated in procurement irregularities under investigation by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), and that it would be obliged to repay substantial sums.
“The questions were not framed as neutral inquiries but rather proceed from the assumption that unlawful conduct has already occurred and that adverse legal consequences necessarily follow,” she said.
She said the company had a right to protect its reputation and dignity, and the relief sought would not prevent legitimate reporting, but only restrain the publication of “specific” assertions pending proper adjudication.
In his answering affidavit, GroundUp editor Nathan Geffen said the application amounted to an attempt to gag reporting by the news agency on what was clearly in the public interest, given that ProEthics had received public funds.
“The fact of the matter is that the company was appointed by the NLC to advise in respect of proper and ethical governance. It was paid large amounts of money and also disbursed funds on the NLC’s behalf,” he said.
Geffen said GroundUp had published five previous articles relating to ProEthics’ contract with the NLC in which many of the assertions in the proposed article had already been made. He said a company did not have a protected “right to dignity”.
Referring to the background facts, Geffen said that in November 2020, President Cyril Ramaphosa had signed a proclamation authorising the SIU to investigate serious allegations of corruption, malpractice and maladministration in the NLC between 2014 and 2020.
Recent reports indicated that crimes and mismanagement involving over R2-billion were being investigated.
In 2022, the Auditor General of South Africa flagged possible irregular expenditure at the NLC, and specifically named ProEthics. The minister then appointed TSU Investigating Services to investigate. TSU released its final report in November 2023.
By then, the entire board of the NLC had been replaced, and disciplinary proceedings were initiated against some executives, including NLC company secretary Nompumelelo Nene. She faced disciplinary charges, 44 of which related to “gross misconduct” in the appointment of ProEthics” and irregular payments made to third-party service providers.
Joseph had written several articles from a draft TSU report, which implicated ProEthics in suspicious transactions. The company challenged only one article with the press ombud. The ombud dismissed all the complaints except one relating to the words “payment laundering”.
“Whilst I found the press ombud’s assessment of the word ‘laundering’ overly technical and narrow, I also noted that the press ombud found the conduct of the applicant was certainly improper. In light of the overwhelming rejection of the applicant’s other complaints, I decided to implement the ruling and changed the phrase ‘launder payments to service providers’ with ‘circumvent procurement processes’,” Geffen said in his affidavit.
Geffen said the TSU report recommended that the NLC recover money from entities identified in the Auditor-General’s report.
In August 2025, Joseph began pressing the NLC on what steps it had taken to recover the funds. In October, he was told by NLC executive legal manager Lesedi Bohang that the NLC legal team was about to commence legal proceedings against ProEthics and others, but then the President extended the SIU proclamation, and this now took precedence.
The amended proclamation covers the period of the ProEthics contract and explicitly includes service providers. ProEthics is named in the new proclamation.
Geffen said ProEthics “actively markets its virtues” and its dealings with big business and government, placing it firmly in the public domain.
He said Joseph’s questions to ProEthics in December related to the company’s knowledge of the NLC legal process (now abandoned), its knowledge of the SIU investigation, and its inclusion in the extended proclamation. He asked about specific amounts highlighted as recoverable in the TSU report and payments made by ProEthics to third parties, in breach of NLC supply chain management policy.
This was based on the disclosure by Bohang to Joseph, the new proclamation, the TSU report findings and recommendations, and the Nene charge sheet, most of which were already in the public domain.
“It is clear that each allegation in the questions which the proposed article will be based on, is in fact true. There is furthermore strong public interest in the subject matter,” Geffen said.
GroundUp will publish Raymond Joseph’s report on ProEthics on Wednesday.