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Johannesburg - Controversial SA Reserve Bank (Sarb)
shareholder Stephen Goodson has quit as a director of the central bank.
"Mr Stephen Goodson, a shareholder elected
non-executive director of the SA Reserve Bank, has resigned as board member
with effect from May 3 2012," the Sarb said in a statement late on
Thursday.
His term was due to end in July.
Last month, the Mail & Guardian (M&G) reported that
Goodson held contentious views that included admiring the economic policies
pursued by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.
He also reportedly believed that international bankers
financed and manipulated the war against Hitler because they saw his model of
state capitalism as a threat, and that the Holocaust was a fiction invented to
extract vast amounts of compensation from the defeated Germans.
Goodson allegedly wrote various articles that appeared on
right-wing websites.
Legislation was passed in 2010 that would ensure activist
shareholders of the Sarb would no longer be able to elect directors to its
board.
Goodson was the last of these directors, and was elected a
non-executive director in 2003.
However, there were calls to fire him before then, given his
controversial views.
Goodson told the M&G there were at least 105 Stephen Goodsons in the US alone, and the M&G would have to check carefully before assuming that any article had been written by him.
