A business that Mark Burke was closely associated with has been in the media after the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) had one of its accounts blocked amid an inquiry around foreign exchange dealings. The business dealt in cryptocurrency arbitrage. The press has reported this in sensational terms, suggesting corruption. We called everyone we could think of and read everything we could find on the matter and do not think that is the correct interpretation.

Burke entered Parliament for the Democratic Alliance (DA) in 2024. Born in Kroonstad in 1989, Burke studied at North-West University and the University of Cape Town before going on to Cambridge University, where he completed an MPhil in technology policy and a PhD in econometrics and quantitative economics. His academic work has included computer engineering, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and technology policy. Before entering Parliament, Burke was an entrepreneur in the financial technology sector, co-founding fintech company Kastelo and founding ExpandRand, a money-transfer business aimed at South Africans living abroad. In Parliament he emerged as the DA’s leading influence on economic and fiscal policy, including leading the fight over 2025’s proposed VAT increase. In April 2026, he was elected the DA’s federal finance chairperson, placing him within the party’s national leadership.

A crypto-arbitrage business is, like any other investment business, an entity that buys and sells financial assets in pursuit of a profit. These can be stocks or bonds or anything similar and in this case those assets were cryptocurrencies. These were purchased overseas and sold in South Africa, as this was generally the most profitable way to conduct the business.

For that purpose, the business enabled clients to use their foreign exchange allowances to buy dollars in South Africa, transfer those dollars offshore to purchase crypto, and then brought the crypto back into South Africa and sold it in the country.

Rands to dollars, dollars to crypto, and crypto back into South Africa was essentially the process. This is routine practice in that industry.

If you have ever given your wealth manager a mandate to take your rands, buy dollars, and use those dollars to invest in the stock market abroad, then you have done something very similar – except in that case nothing was imported back into South Africa as the stocks remained outside of the country.

So what is the problem?

It all comes down to a technical argument around mandates.

In the investment world, there are two kinds of mandates: discretionary mandates and non-discretionary mandates.

Under a discretionary mandate, the client allows the investment firm to make decisions on his or her behalf, and no prior individual approval for trades is needed from the client.

Under a non-discretionary mandate, the client remains the decision-maker and must be consulted on every individual decision.

In South Africa, an investment firm can hold licences for one, or the other, or both forms of mandate. Burke’s firm held both discretionary and non-discretionary mandate licences, allowing it to make investment decisions on behalf of clients.

If you have ever told your wealth manager, “Here’s some money, you know what you’re doing, go and invest it as you think best, and let’s meet now and again to see how it’s going,” then you will understand this concept.

So why have mandates become a debate point?

Because crypto arbitrage is regulated through three different government agencies, and these have different understandings of mandates, and this created a technical contradiction of sorts that landed on the SARB’s desk.

The three agencies are the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), the South African Revenue Service (SARS), and then of course the SARB.

The technical issue is this:

The FSCA issued discretionary and non-discretionary mandate licences to the firm in which Burke was involved. This meant they could receive mandates from clients to make investment decisions on their behalf.

The clients accordingly provided such mandates.

Next came SARS, from whom permission had to be sought for clients to use their foreign exchange allowances to buy crypto. This was also done. Those permissions were granted explicitly for the purpose of conducting crypto arbitrage.

Then comes the SARB, which says it requires the client to be the principal actor to a foreign exchange transaction – even though it also envisages circumstances where a firm acts as an agent for a client.

From there arises the technical issue. The FSCA grants a discretionary licence, the client grants discretion enabling the use of their foreign exchange allowances, SARS signs off on that use to buy crypto for crypto arbitrage, but the Reserve Bank asks whether the client remains the principal party to the transaction.

In resolving the matter, the SARB sought a freeze on one of the firm’s accounts, which it is within its rights to do, and it must be allowed to conduct its work diligently, which by all accounts appears to be the case.

The firm sought to challenge that freeze, because it severely affected the business’s cash flows, and the court said no, wait for the SARB to complete its work.

That is essentially the sum of it. Our readers can make up their own minds about whether this amounts to corruption, state capture, or the other allegations that have been levelled or inferred against Burke over the past week.

What we think is that it plainly does not.

Burke is an exceptionally capable person and because of that was extremely successful in business. He is still only in his 30s, and had he remained in that world he was well on his way to becoming another of the globally celebrated South African business and entrepreneurial exports. He is that good, in the league of the very best in the world – is what the best people we spoke to told us.

But then he did something odd. Two years ago, he walked away from that path to join the DA and enter politics. He would not say it himself, but we think he entered politics because he felt he had no other choice – the sense of moral responsibility to help his country was just too overwhelming. If that is right, it makes him a rare thing in politics – a good and decent person of unusual brilliance and determination who, accepting a great personal sacrifice, did his best to make his country better. There are very few of those in politics and they come around very seldom.

But what did the legacy media do with that last week? It pissed all over it and portrayed him as no good, as a crook, a fraudster, and a thief no better than the worst of South Africa’s state capture criminals. It was a disgusting thing to do. This is why our country does not move ahead, and why your life is more difficult than it should be. It’s because the media pulls down the people and ideas we need to make South Africa better and spits on them.

Do not blame the SARB. They are doing what they must do – and God knows South Africa needs more thoroughness on the part of its regulators and watchdogs. Burke’s rivals in business, who feared that he was squeezing their margins, were doing what rivals in business sometimes do. The African National Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters have behaved with their typical depraved dirty politics. None of that, however, would have amounted to much if the media did not pile in to drive the hate and destruction.

Blame the editors and journalists who turned a technical dispute into a lynch mob to bring down one of the best people South Africa has in its politics.

If Burke sticks with politics, and who would blame him if he did not after what the media has put him through, and if he rises to a position where he has real leverage over the future of the country, we think he has the ability to shift the dial on South Africa.

Burke sacrificed a lot to go into Parliament and has now lost a great deal more – he did that for you, for us, for every South African. Regardless of what he does next, at this newspaper he is a hero and we are proud to stand up for him.