GroundUp is being sued. Please help fund our defence.

GroundUp has been exposing corruption in the Lottery since October 2018. Now the COO of the National Lotteries Commission, Phillemon Letwaba, is suing us. He alleges we have defamed him and he wants the Western Cape High Court to award him R600,000. We are confident that our stories have been accurate and in the public interest, but we need the help of our readers to fund our legal defence.

It's not the first time we've been sued for our Lottery stories. In April 2019, Lottopreneur Lesley Ramulifho asked a court, on an urgent basis, to remove our articles that exposed his shenanigans. The court struck his application from the roll and awarded costs against Ramulifho. But Ramulifho's lawyer continues to send us legal threats.

Our stories have shown a plethora of incomplete projects, conflicts of interest, poor corporate governance and self-enrichment. Raymond Joseph and Anton van Zyl, publisher of the Limpopo Mirror, have researched and reported the stories. Joseph is named as the first respondent in Letwaba's lawsuit. On 31 October, Joseph and Van Zyl won the Vodacom Regional (Western Cape) Award for Investigative Journalism, a vindication of our reportage.

Please support our work by making a once-off or regular tax-deductible donation using one of the following methods: