South African tycoon Iqbal Survé's side loses a bid for the big banks' compliance files

South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal struck down an order on Sept. 23 that would have forced the country's financial intelligence agency to hand confidential records to bank customers fighting the closure of their accounts, calling the request a fishing expedition.

The people who won that order in the first place were not Iqbal Survé. They were customers who joined the wider court battle he and his Sekunjalo group are fighting against South Africa's largest banks, among them Siphokazi Ndudane, a former official at the then Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and the late trade unionist Dennis George. Both had their bank accounts closed after banks cited risk or compliance concerns.

Why Sekunjalo is in this fight

Survé is a medical doctor who built Sekunjalo Investment Holdings from 1997 into a group spanning fishing, property, technology and media. It owns Independent Media, publisher of the Cape Times, the Cape Argus and the Star, which a Sekunjalo-led consortium bought in 2013 with funding that included the Public Investment Corporation, the state body managing South African government employees' pensions.

The trouble started with a second state investment. The corporation put about 4.3 billion rand into AYO Technology Solutions, a Sekunjalo company, when it listed on the Johannesburg exchange in 2017, and that transaction became one of the central subjects of the Mpati Commission, a judicial inquiry into the corporation's governance that reported in 2020.

Banks began closing Sekunjalo's accounts from 2021, citing reputational risk. Nedbank, Absa, FirstRand, Standard Bank, Investec and others withdrew services from the group and from companies and individuals connected to it, which for a business that pays suppliers and staff is close to a death sentence.

Survé says the reason was race. Sekunjalo argues the banks treated it far more harshly than what it calls white-dominated businesses that had been through genuine accounting scandals, and took the fight to the Equality Court, a special court that hears discrimination claims under South Africa's constitution. The banks deny it and say the decisions rested on commercial, regulatory and risk grounds.

That case is where this week's ruling comes from.

What the applicants wanted

They wanted the Financial Intelligence Centre's files.

The centre collects and analyses reports of suspicious transactions filed by banks and other businesses, and the applicants argued its records would show they had been treated worse than companies implicated in actual wrongdoing.

Judge Daniel Thulare agreed in the Equality Court in February 2024 and ordered the centre to produce banks' internal risk documents and suspicious transaction reports. Refusing to disclose them, he wrote, would allow "the foul smell of racism and white superiority to linger around major banks in the republic".

Survé called the ruling a significant victory at the time.

Why the appeal court threw it out

The appeal court found the applicants had sought an overbroad order and were fishing for information they had not established any right to see, and said they had persuaded the Equality Court into relief that produced a legally untenable judgment.

The reach of the order was the problem. It demanded records not only about the applicants but about companies across South African business, including Sekunjalo group companies, EOH, KPMG, Steinhoff and Tongaat Hulett, along with the internal risk documents of Absa, FNB, Nedbank, Investec and Standard Bank. The court said those banks had a direct interest in keeping information they gave the centre confidential and should have been brought into the case.

Relevance was also missing. The applicants asked for every suspicious transaction report involving Sekunjalo companies without explaining what those had to do with their own claims, and none of them banked with Nedbank. George had been a non-executive director of AYO Technology, but Sekunjalo itself was not an applicant.

The order stretched wider still. It covered reports filed about the applicants by what the law calls accountable institutions, a category taking in lawyers, estate agents, insurers, foreign exchange dealers, lenders, gambling businesses, financial advisers and money remitters, none of which were parties either.

The judges set out what the agency is for. Treating it as an alternative source of documents for private litigation is inconsistent with its statutory purpose of collecting confidential financial intelligence for regulators and law enforcement, they said, and it is not a repository of discoverable information.

They stopped short of a blanket rule. The judgment says the centre's information is not immune from court-ordered disclosure in an appropriate case, and that these applicants simply had not established a right to what they asked for.

What it changes

Almost nothing, immediately.

The applicants abandoned the disclosure order in February 2025 while the appeal was under way, so nobody was going to receive the documents. The centre, Nedbank and Absa pressed on because the ruling remained on the books and could shape future cases.

Survé and Sekunjalo were not parties to the disclosure case or to the appeal. The dispute began as an interlocutory application inside the Equality Court case they brought, and Thulare's order had also required the centre to produce suspicious transaction reports concerning Sekunjalo Investment Holdings and related companies.

The main discrimination case against the banks has still not been heard.