IDAC wrote down how it picks cases. The Commission now has the document.

Evidence on day 151 placed three of IDAC's own governing instruments before the Commission. The first is "a standard operating procedure referred to as the IDAC Operation Manual," "issued and signed by Advocate Johnson and Mr Matthew Sesoko, the Head of Investigation, on 16 October 2024." Johnson and Sesoko "also issued a Case Selection Criteria Manual," which the witness said was written to "set out in detail the process to be followed in selecting cases to be investigated by IDAC." Alongside them sits a case selection criteria directive, likewise signed by the same two officials. All were provided to the Commission. The witness also described what the instruments require: "The investigation process is supposed to follow a sequence as set out in the SOPs in the case selection criteria directive." That sequence was given in order — prosecutors reach consensus and "we were to draft a certificate of mandate"; "once the certificate of mandate was signed, the prosecutors were to attend to drafting the application of authorisation of a section 28(13) investigation"; "once authorisation was signed, we were to consult with the investigators and draft an investigation plan"; and "should the investigation yield evidence of criminality, we had to motivate for a section 28(1) authorisation." The significance is evidential rather than accusatory. Questions about how this investigation came to extend beyond the original complaint have so far been argued from inference — who wanted what, and why. A signed internal standard converts that into a comparison a reader can perform: the organisation stated in writing how cases were to be selected and authorised, and the record can be set against it. Two items in the same evidence bear on that comparison and neither is resolved. The witness stated that "Advocate Johnson decided shortly after the section 28(13) authorisation of the Crime Intelligence matters, that all other Crime Intelligence matters would be ring-fenced into a project." Separately, a witness statement before the Commission records the instruction "I was to draft the authorisation and email it to her on the same day that the referral was handed to me" — a compression of the steps the sequence places before authorisation. A departure from an internal manual carries no criminal consequence on its own. It engages a narrower question, and one a court can examine: whether a statutory power was exercised for the purpose it was conferred for. Where an organisation has written down the tests it will apply before invoking that power, its own document becomes evidence of what a proper exercise looked like by its own lights. Nothing in the extracted record establishes that the sequence was departed from in any particular case; what it establishes is that a documented standard exists and is now in evidence. From the bench, Adv Baloyi SC put the point to the witness in stronger terms — "if we complied with it and adhered to it, then what is happening now would not happen" — which is a proposition put in questioning, not a finding.