We know who donates to SA’s political parties — but who really pays? - Daily Maverick

The Political Funding Act has failed to provide transparency as to who is donating money to the various political parties. What is needed is mandatory, proactive disclosure of beneficial ownership information to ensure voters can track actual political influence ahead of elections.

Ramakwe Pule is a senior project coordinator: Money in Politics at My Vote Counts.

The Political Funding Act (PFA) was meant to make political party funding more transparent, and the Independent Electoral Commission’s (IEC) Quarterly Declarations Report is the mechanism through which voters are supposed to see who is donating money to political parties. But sometimes, the more closely we examine the donors disclosed in the report, the more questions emerge.  

In the fourth quarter of the 2025/26 financial year, We Are The People turned a R30-million loan to Rise Mzansi into a donation. Beyond the name appearing in the report, who is behind We Are The People, and who ultimately stands behind the money? 

Then there is Kerry Road Trust, which donated R2.5-million to the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the first quarter of the 2026/27 financial year. When we search for “Kerry Road Trust”, however, the information takes us beyond South Africa.

The entity appears in the Australian Business Register as The Trustee for CPIF 138 Kerry Road Trust – an active fixed unit trust with its main business location in New South Wales, Australia. That immediately raises another question: if this trust is foreign, how does its donation fit within South Africa’s PFA? 

We are not suggesting that the Kerry Road Trust donation was unlawful. The information currently available does not establish that the trust identified in the Australian Business Register is the same entity as the donor disclosed to the IEC, nor does it establish the purpose for which the donation was made.

If the trusts are the same, however, the donation could raise questions under the PFA’s restrictions on donations from foreign entities and the limited exceptions for training, skills development or policy development. The fact that searching the name of a political donor leads us to a foreign trust therefore demonstrates precisely why the question of who really stands behind political donations matters. 

This is where the problem with transparency under the PFA becomes apparent. Knowing the name of the legal entity does not necessarily tell voters who ultimately owns, controls or benefits from the legal entity. 

In its 2018 landmark ruling in My Vote Counts (MVC) Non-Profit Company (NPC) v Minister of Justice and Correctional Services, the Constitutional Court held that information about the private funding of political parties and independent candidates is essential for the effective exercise of citizens’ political rights.

Simply put, knowing who funds political parties and independent candidates, the Constitutional Court held, is necessary for voters to make meaningful political choices and to participate in elections.

That ruling catalysed public pressure for reform and led Parliament to enact the PFA, which came into effect on 1 April 2021, establishing a more transparent and accountable framework for public and private political party funding. 

Five years after the implementation of the PFA, however, a more fundamental question is emerging: do we know who really funds our political parties?

The PFA obliges political parties to disclose information on a quarterly basis about their private donors making donations exceeding the disclosure threshold of R200,000 to the IEC, which in turn makes these disclosures available on its website in the form of a report.  

The IEC has developed a detailed standard form, PPR4, for political parties to make these disclosures, requiring, among other things, information concerning the names and surnames of juristic persons or legal entities making donations above the disclosure threshold prescribed in the PFA.

The primary rationale for disclosures is to enable voters to make informed political choices and to facilitate scrutiny by media and civil society organisations, which have proven to be effective watchdogs, an important complement to state oversight, and instrumental in advancing transparency and anti-corruption concerning corporate-party relations. 

But disclosure is not the same as transparency.

The IEC’s report tells us which individuals and legal entities have made significant donations. My Vote Counts concedes that while we can identify many donors where they have a public profile, there are also donors whom it is often difficult, if not impossible, to identify, to a high degree of certainty, without the identifying beneficial ownership information (BOI).

The examples of We Are The People and Kerry Road Trust illustrate this difficulty. Although the IEC’s report identifies these legal entities as donors of significant political donations, that disclosure does not necessarily reveal the identities of the natural persons who ultimately control or own these legal entities.

The problem is particularly apparent where trusts, investment firms and private corporations are disclosed in the IEC’s report. Voters may learn the name of the legal entity through which a donation was made without learning who is behind the donation. 

Consequently, legal entities for which BOI is not publicly disclosed can be used as conduits or proxies for political donations, while the identities of the individuals behind these entities remain undisclosed, particularly where privacy and reputational concerns are invoked.  

Further, these legal entities trigger donors to adopt strategic patterns to circumvent the PFA’s disclosure threshold or upper limit, such as making donations in their personal capacity and through one or more of these entities in which they enjoy the benefits of ownership and control without voters necessarily being able to identify that the donations originate from the same ultimate source.

The donations made by Fynbos Ekwiteit (Pty) Ltd and Fynbos Kapitaal (Pty) Ltd to the DA provide a useful illustration. The two entities are connected to Capitec Bank founder Michiel le Roux and, while they appear as separate legal donors in the IEC’s report, their combined donations raise the question of whether voters can appreciate the extent of influence exercised by a single ultimate source. In the first quarter of the 2026/27 financial year alone, these entities donated a combined R55-million to the DA.

While these donations may comply with the PFA because they were made by separate legal entities, the disclosures do not, on their own, tell voters who ultimately owns or controls these entities or allow them to readily connect the donations to a common source. 

Moreover, the report makes it difficult to connect the dots when a legal entity has little or no public profile. Where the public cannot access BOI, and the entity has no website, social media presence, or readily available information about its activities or directors, identifying who ultimately stands behind a political donation becomes particularly difficult.

Where such entities operate as charitable or public-interest vehicles, they may also not be readily identifiable through public registers such as the Department of Social Development’s NPO database. 

The upshot is that these legal entities are a specific manifestation of what Dr Heather Thuynsma describes in her article, Business influence and party finance in South Africa: analysing corporate support, regulatory dynamics, and political will as an adaptive system, as an “adaptive ecosystem” in which legal reforms force corporate strategies to evolve rather than eliminate opacity altogether. 

According to the IEC’s reports for the 2025/26 financial year, a substantial proportion of donations was made through these legal entities. The trend continues into the 2026/27 financial year, underscoring that the problem is not isolated to a single financial year, but remains a persistent feature of our political funding regime.

Investigative journalists have previously traced the beneficial owners behind some legal entities without BOI, including through their reporting on the Gupta Leaks. Yet, BOI remains hidden in the IEC’s report, leaving voters in the dark about who ultimately stands behind these legal entities and the influence they wield over our democracy.  

There may, however, be another avenue to obtaining BOI. The Promotion of Access to Information Act (Paia) may enable access to records relating to BOI that are held by the IEC but are not disclosed in its report. But this raises a more fundamental question: should voters have to resort to individual Paia requests to establish who ultimately stands behind significant political donations?

If the objective of the IEC’s report is to enable voters to make meaningful political choices, BOI necessary for that assessment should be disclosed proactively, rather than only becoming accessible through a Paia application. 

In line with global trends, South Africa has strengthened its beneficial ownership laws to curb the misuse of legal entities for which BOI is not publicly disclosed for corruption, money laundering, terrorist financing and tax evasion.

Yet, the PFA has not kept pace, creating regulatory vulnerabilities that allow these legal entities making large political donations to flourish. This presents a growing challenge to the integrity of our political funding regime.  

South Africa fought for the right to know who funds our politics. Five years into the PFA, the question is whether we know enough to understand who is really exercising influence. Transparency cannot stop at the name of the legal entity that donates. It must extend to the people who ultimately own or control it. This is why My Vote Counts will submit a Paia application to the IEC for records relating to political funding disclosures. 

The application will seek any BOI contained in, submitted with, or obtained in connection with the prescribed PPR4 and PPR5 forms, as well as supporting documentation and verification records held by the IEC.

The purpose is not to allege wrongdoing. It is to establish whether the IEC, responsible for administering the political funding regime, holds BOI that can reveal who is ultimately behind the legal entities listed as donors in its 2025/26-2026/27 financial year reports. Because knowing the name of the legal entity is not enough if we do not know who is behind the money. DM