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Botswana’s High Court ruled on Friday that corruption claims made against South African mining executive Bridgette Motsepe were false and ordered the former government investigator who repeated them to issue an apology.
Motsepe is the sister of South Africa’s First Lady, Tshepo Motsepe, and billionaire Patrice Motsepe.
In 2019, Motsepe was implicated in allegations that she conspired with Botswana’s then-president Ian Khama to launder billions of dollars. These funds were purportedly intended to incite political unrest and overthrow the stable southern African nation’s government.
However, a 2020 investigation by a British law firm found these allegations to be baseless.
Friday’s High Court ruling specifically targeted Jako Hubona, an investigator with Botswana’s anti-corruption agency, who had reiterated the false claims.
The court ordered Hubona to retract a 2019 statement asserting that Motsepe was a “co-signatory to bank accounts in which funds allegedly stolen from the Bank of Botswana were laundered and implicated her in financing terrorism.”
The court deemed these statements “unlawful, false, and defamatory,” giving Hubona seven days to publish an “unconditional retraction and apology.”
At the time the allegations first surfaced, South African banks also denied that Motsepe, founder and chief executive of Mmakau Mining, was a co-signatory on the alleged bank account.
The political backdrop to these claims includes the falling out between former president Ian Khama, who governed Botswana from 2008 to 2018, and his handpicked successor, Mokgweetsi Masisi.
Khama had accused Masisi of authoritarianism. In 2024, Masisi lost power in a landslide victory for President Duma Boko, ending nearly six decades of rule by the Botswana Democratic Party.
