Cape Talk, Monday afternoon

Kicked out of court, and there seems to have been a restriction placed on media access to the criminal trial. Peter du Toit is the assistant editor for investigations at News24 and joins us now. Tell us what has led to this application. What is this exclusion of the media from proceedings? Good afternoon, Mandy. And I can tell you that Kyle Cowan, that you referred to moments ago, was kicked out of court.

Court again around 15 minutes ago by the presiding judge, Judge Michevalele. So we will proceed on Wednesday with an urgent application to be heard in the High Court in Pretoria. Your question, the background to this is Delane D Lomore was a senior official at the State Security Agency alongside Patrick Mchitola, that you mentioned earlier as well. They are standing trial in the High Court on charges of theft, corruption, uttering.

Fraud related to a fraudulent contract that sought to extract almost 12 million rands in resources and money from the SSA. This trial started last Wednesday in Canberra after an application by the state, by the NPA, to hold the trial in Camero, which we are uncertain why. We came across this knowledge on Friday afternoon or Friday morning rather than that the trial had started, had proceeded without the

Media or public in attendance. We briefed counsel and lawyers Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, delivered papers yesterday afternoon, and this morning tried to make the argument in court why the media and the public deserve access to this specific trial, given the fact that Dlormor was such a senior and central figure during the state capture era. But the judge, I have to say, I experienced those rather hostile towards the interests of the public, the media, and open justice.

SSA, the State Security Agency Many, have indicated that they will oppose any application by Media24, Dali Maverick, Omar Bungane, and the Campaign for Free Expression, which will now be heard on Wednesdays. I just want to try and understand this. So there was an order that was granted, but your argument is that they have gone beyond the order's terms and they didn't let the media know beforehand. You are absolutely correct. And no one knew about it. In fact, no one knew about the trial beings.

The trial was going to start. That's the first problem. Second problem was that when the application was brought in court, interested parties such as the media were not notified that this application was being heard. And the third hurdle or the third problem that we have, we don't have sight of the original application. So we don't know exactly precisely why the state and SSA, for that matter, does not want this case to be heard in open court. So there's a lot of problems with this.