JOHANNESBURG, May 28 (Reuters) – South Africa's parliament has called for a meeting of the impeachment committee on Monday to further investigate President Cyril Ramaphosa's allegations related to the “Farmgate” scandal, the Democratic Alliance party said on Thursday.
The meeting is the next stage of the impeachment process against Ramaphosa, which was revived by the constitutional court earlier this month.
A parliament spokesman declined to comment, and Ramaphosa's spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ramaphosa has denied wrongdoing over the scandal, which saw bundles of cash stolen from a couch at his farm in 2020. An independent panel found preliminary evidence that he had committed misconduct in 2022, but Ramaphosa's party the African National Congress blocked the impeachment process through a parliamentary vote that year.
This month the Constitutional Court declared that vote invalid, effectively resurrecting the process.
On Tuesday, Ramaphosa filed papers in court arguing that the panel's findings against him were flawed and should be quashed. He threatened to immediately seek a court order to halt impeachment proceedings if Parliament moved forward with the process while his legal challenge was pending.
(Reporting by Anathi Madubela, Nilutpal Timsina and Safundo Parkozov; Editing by Alexander Vining)