Former ANC MP Tony Yengeni has written to the ANC electoral committee to reconsider its decision to ban him from contesting for positions in the party’s 55th National Conference starting at Nasrec, south of Johannesburg on Friday.
According to ANC electoral committee chairperson Kgalema Motlanthe, Yengeni did not pass the vetting process as stated in a letter dated December 9 highlighting Yengeni’s criminal record as the reason for his disqualification from contesting for any position in the ANC.
Yengeni was sentenced to four years in prison after he was found guilty of fraud for not disclosing a discount he received for a Mercedes Benz vehicle he purchased in 1998.
In a letter to Motlanthe on Tuesday, Yengeni said he had served his time and his conviction was expunged.
According to the former MP, he has no criminal record in the eyes of the law and therefore there is no ground for him to be barred from being elected to the national executive committee of the ANC.
“Firstly, it is true that I was found guilty and sentenced to four years imprisonment for which I served four months. After more than 10 years of the sentence I applied to the Director-General of the Justice and Constitutional Development for the expungement of my criminal record,” said Yengeni.
“My application for expungement was accordingly approved. The Resolution on which you seek to disqualify me from participation at the upcoming 55th National Conference of the ANC was only taken in 2017, however, I had been sentenced more than 15 years since then and had also been punished by the ANC for the said offence; and to now seek to apply the 2017 Conference resolution in retrospect to offences committed prior thereto is both unlawful and unconstitutional to say in the very least.
“I would like to make it clear that in the eyes of the law I have no previous conviction and or sentence,” he said.
Yengeni was disqualified from contesting even though he was not listed among the 200 candidates nominated for the 86-member ANC executive committee. Should his appeal succeed, he would need to be nominated from the floor at the conference to make it on the ballot.
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