Minister Mbalula untruthful about Mayweather tour, there are invoices to prove it
17 January 2016
Minister of Sport and Recreation, Fikile Mbalula, launched a vitriolic attack on the DA on Friday, claiming that his Department did not pay for boxing champion Floyd Mayweather's Reawakening the Giant Tour of South Africa in 2014. The Minister doth protest too much.
Despite the Minister’s repeated claims that his Department did not spend a single cent for the Mayweather Tour, the DA is in possession of two invoices as well as two corresponding payment certificates in the public domain, for a total of R304,950 paid to sports media company, Frontiers Sport, by the Department of Sport and Recreation for an event directly linked to Mr Mayweather's tour.
These transactions are a clear confirmation that the Minister misled Parliament in his previous responses to our Parliamentary questions and that he lied to South Africans in several public statements.
Additionally, a top representative of Frontiers Sport confirmed with the DA categorically today that the company was paid close to R500 000 by the Department of Sports and Recreation for “a number of tables, branding and advertising” at a gala dinner held at Emperors Palace during Mayweather’s visit in January 2014.
We are not surprised that Minister Mbalula has, yet again, resorted to his trademark name-calling, trolling and victim-playing to fictional conspiracies. So colourful is his imagination that he now blames a "collaboration" between the DA and the media for the fact that his falsehoods have caught up with him.
The bottom line is that Minister Mbalula now finds himself in a tangled web of deception and poor spin over the true and full cost of Floyd Mayweather's Tour of South Africa. The Minister has had numerous opportunities to be truthful and reveal all the costs, yet he failed to do so and chose obfuscation and prevarication instead until he was compelled to reveal all through a PAIA application submitted by a journalist.
Statement issued by Solly Malatsi MP, DA Shadow Minister of Sports and Recreation, 17 January 2016
