Outgoing Absa chair Wendy Lucas-Bull has opened up on the fallout with former board member Sipho Pityana, now locked in a legal dispute with the bank and the Prudential Authority (PA) after not being named as her successor.
Pityana was sacked from Absa’s board in November 2021 after he unexpectedly announced the month before that he was suing the PA, the regulator of financial services firms, for allegedly blocking him from being considered for the chair role that Lucas-Bull is vacating at the end of March. Absa said that by suing the regulator Pityana put his interests before those of the bank and was derelict in his duties.
Pityana responded by filing legal papers against Absa, saying his removal was unlawful. At the heart of his grievance is the claim that PA head Kuben Naidoo, who is also deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, engaged in an informal process with Absa to block his nomination as chair.
Pityana said this was due to sexual harassment allegations against him, which he denies, when he was chair of AngloGold Ashanti. He accused former Absa CEO Maria Ramos, who replaced him as AngloGold’s chair when he left in December 2020, of tipping off the bank about the sexual harassment allegations against him.
However, Lucas-Bull told Business Day in an interview on Tuesday that it was Pityana who told her of the allegations, although this was initially disclosed confidentially.
“He had told me towards the end of the year before that there had been this allegation but that it had been resolved and that neither AngloGold Ashanti nor the complainant were going to take it any further,” she said. “I made the assumption, wrongly, that it was concluded in his favour. I was not aware that there had been a senior counsel independent review that actually had a finding against him.”
Lucas-Bull says that after Absa put forward Pityana’s name to the PA along with another candidate — presumably Sello Moloko, who eventually won the chair role — as the preferred candidates, the regulator advised the bank to investigate his sudden departure from AngloGold Ashanti. She says she approached Pityana at this point about disclosing details of the matter to the board, but he said he was bound by confidentiality.
“I said I think I am going to call and get that waived, which I did,” says Lucas-Bull. “I called Maria — she did not say at that point in time what the issues were at all. She got back to me a day later and said the AngloGold Ashanti board waives any confidentiality that he may think he has — and he may share with us and the PA all the issues leading up to his departure...and that’s when the reports came out. His lawyers supplied it ... to the subcommittee.”
Pityana told Business Day on March 1 that Ramos had used the allegations of sexual harassment against him to mount a “coup d’état” that resulted in her replacing him as chair of the world’s third-largest gold miner. He reiterated the claim that it was Ramos who told Absa of the allegations, claiming it was “chicanery of the worst kind”.
Yet when Business Day contacted Pityana on Wednesday to respond to Lucas-Bull’s claim that he had told her of the sexual harassment allegations confidentially, he said it was true.
“I took her into confidence and shared with her a range of issues that I was confronted with,” Pityana said. “I also indicated to her the allegations, which I contend [are] false allegations of sexual harassment ... she was the first person to get that indication from me and I had to do so in confidence.”
Asked why he had alleged Ramos tipped Absa off about the harassment allegations Pityana said she had done so “indirectly” by first informing the PA, which, in turn, informed the Absa board.
“The interesting thing is that no less a person than Kuben Naidoo from the PA confirms that ... the person who shared with the PA information in respect of an investigation into sexual harassment and a report arising from that investigation was Maria Ramos,” said Pityana.
“He says this in a letter that he sent to my lawyers who enquired as to why they [the PA] would object to my nomination as the chair. It is Maria who publicised to the regulator and indirectly to the Absa board the issues pertaining to [the] sexual harassment allegations and the report thereto — that’s my assertion.”
Lucas-Bull confirmed details that first emerged in Pityana’s own court papers towards the end of 2021 that Absa had appointed senior attorney Peter Harris to conduct a legal review of an investigative report into the sexual harassment allegations conducted by advocate Heidi Barnes at the request of AngloGold.
“He didn’t opine on the outcome, obviously he couldn’t do that because he didn’t interview any of the individuals, but he felt that the process was flawed and therefore his question was that you can’t rely on the outcome because the process was flawed,” said Lucas-Bull.
“That report was made available to Sipho and actually the advice was: go and take that thing on review. You’ve now got this [report] that we’ve paid for. Take it on appeal or do whatever you need to do, but that’s where your source of reputation risk is. That process is going to take a while and we as a bank can’t wait for that process to get sorted. There’s too much reputation risk at this point in time.”
Lucas-Bull steps down as Absa chair at end-March after nine years in the role, the maximum allotted time before nonexecutive directors are no longer considered independent, according to PA guidelines. She now moves on to the Shoprite chair role after being named chair-designate at the retailer in October 2020.
“The draw for me was that it’s a very significant entity,” Lucas-Bull said of Shoprite. “It has the opportunity to have a significant impact on the lives of everyday people because they are everywhere ... and it’s a really exciting team.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.