On Wednesday morning, Anoj Singh, who is at the centre of corruption allegations at Eskom involving the Gupta family, held two mysterious meetings at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Rosebank, Johannesburg. This is hardly the appropriate time for Eskom’s chief financial officer to be holding private meetings with his colleagues.
Singh was placed on special leave on July 27, following pressure from lenders after Eskom received an audit qualification for incurring R3bn in irregular expenditure.
He is suspected of corruption after leaked e-mails revealed he had been hosted by the Guptas in Dubai while helping them to buy Optimum coal mine by arranging a R1.6bn guarantee and authorising an irregular R660m prepayment.
He was also instrumental in reducing Optimum’s R2bn fine to R577m after the mine was bought by the Guptas.
Last week, Business Day discovered that Singh was also implicated in wrongdoing in an interim report by law firm Bowmans, which investigated fee payments totalling R1.6bn by Eskom to Gupta-linked financial advisory firm Trillian and global consultancy McKinsey.
When the board announced he had been placed on special leave on a “precautionary basis” pending the outcome of a forensic probe, Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown said this would pave the way “for the investigation to take place in a transparent way and ensure confidence in the process”.
His meetings with top Eskom officials at this crucial juncture can only dent this confidence.
The first meeting was with Joel George Martins, a senior manager in the office of the CEO. The second was with Prish Govender, Eskom’s acting head of group capital.
Both hold pivotal positions.
Martins reports to the CEO and runs what are known as “special projects” in his office. In this capacity, he would have enjoyed a close relationship with former CEO Brian Molefe and his interim successors, Matshela Koko and Johnny Dladla. Koko was suspended in May after it emerged the division he headed at Eskom had awarded his daughter-in-law’s company large contracts. The Gupta leaks also exposed how Koko had lent the Guptas a helping hand to buy Optimum, including forwarding them sensitive company e-mails, and was also hosted by the Guptas in Dubai.
Singh’s second meeting at the Hyatt, with Govender, was even more problematic. Govender was in charge of the Trillian and McKinsey project and was about to be suspended for his role in making suspect payments to the consulting firms totalling R1.6bn.
Dladla was sitting idly on the report without taking any appropriate action, the sources said
We don’t know what was discussed because Singh and Martins say it is none of our business and Govender pretended he wasn’t even there.
What we do know is that the meetings coincided with a week of high drama at Eskom, with Govender’s suspension narrowly averted hours later, allegedly at the behest of interim chairman Zethembe Khoza.
On Monday, Eskom handed suspension letters to former procurement head Edwin Mabelane and senior procurement manager Charles Kalima for their role in the Trillian payments. Another suspension letter was prepared for Govender.
According to several senior sources at Eskom, Khoza learned of the suspensions only when he read about them in Business Day on Wednesday morning.
“Khoza phoned the acting chief executive officer [Dladla] and asked what on earth was going on. But Dladla, who was off sick, told him he had learnt of the suspensions after the fact,” said one source.
The sources said that at 1pm, shortly after Singh was sipping mineral water and chamomile tea with Martins and Govender, Khoza convened a meeting on the third floor of Eskom’s Megawatt Park headquarters in Johannesburg with officials from the acting CEO’s office and human resources, procurement and power generation divisions. Khoza allegedly demanded to know why Kalima and Mabelane had been suspended.
“He was told they were implementing the report from Bowman and Eskom forensics,” said another source.
He then allegedly instructed them to lift the suspensions “by 4pm at the latest” and not to hand Govender his suspension letter. The reinstatement letters seen by Business Day were signed later that day.
Khoza has denied this version of events. “That was a management thing,” he said. “I do not get involved.”
However, Khoza’s public backing of Singh when confronted with mounting evidence against him over the Trillian payments casts his objectivity in doubt.
Khoza did not reply to texted follow-up questions about the 1pm meeting and at the time, Eskom said it would not comment on the sudden reversal.
Singh insisted there was “nothing sinister or untoward” about the meetings. “I’m on special leave, I’m not on suspension. There are no restrictions that Eskom has put on me [about] being able to engage with employees,” he said. “I’m not interfering with any investigation. I don’t have access to any information or anything else. So, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”
Singh said that he was unaware that he had been implicated by the Bowman investigation, which recommends suspending him for his role in the Trillian payments.
Khoza learned of the suspensions only when he read about them in business day on Wednesday
“I haven’t been given a copy of the Bowman report.
“Neither has anyone told me that I was the subject of an investigation. So, I can’t comment on that,” he said.
“They said to me I’m on special leave, subject to an investigation into the qualification that the company received on their 2017 financial statements on the request by [the Development Bank of Southern Africa]. That’s all I know.”
Martin declined to disclose what he’d discussed with Singh. “My brother, you can write what you want,” he said.
Asked if he thought it appropriate to meet Singh while he was under investigation, he said: “My brother, this conversation has just ended,” before cutting the call.
Curiously, Govender denied attending the meeting and claimed he had not seen Singh “since he was put on leave”.
After Singh confirmed their meeting, Business Day again called and sent text messages to Govender’s phone, requesting an explanation for the anomalies in their versions but received no response.
Govender said he was aware of “an investigation happening in terms of the Trillian matter”, but not of the recommendation to suspend him.
The interim Bowmans report, according to senior sources at Eskom with direct knowledge of the facts, recommended suspending Koko, Singh, Govender, Mabelane, Kalima and two other officials after finding prima facie evidence that they had committed serious irregularities in paying massive fees to Trillian and McKinsey for a joint project.
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Apparently, another internal investigation at Eskom into the Trillian payments independently came to the same conclusion.
The Bowmans report said Eskom had paid the consultants R1.6bn between April 2016 and February 2017 — even though Trillian did not have a contract with Eskom or McKinsey.
Trillian has denied any wrongdoing and insists it only billed for work done. McKinsey is conducting an internal investigation into why its director Vikash Sagar instructed Govender to pay Trillian directly.
Irregularities found by Bowmans’s investigators included payments made without proper supporting documents — in some instances paying tens of millions more for invoices than amounts authorised — and paying the full eight-month fee for work on a contract that ended after three months.
The report also found that Eskom paid Trillian and McKinsey R200m more than it disclosed to the media in July.
Eskom has previously denied it had paid any money to Trillian, even though it had already disbursed R600m to the company. Invoices were sent directly to Singh and Govender and paid within one to three days, which is unusual for a state entity.
At the time, Trillian was majority-owned by Gupta lieutenant Salim Essa and accused in former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s report of funnelling R235m to the Guptas to buy Optimum, although the company denies this too.
The Bowmans report discovered “a prima facie case
of actionable wrongdoing” because the officials had “improperly and irrationally” advised Eskom’s board tender committee to authorise the payments, the sources said.
Bowmans has recommended that Eskom go to court to recover the money.
Instead of pursuing the remedies available, Dladla was sitting idly on the report without taking any appropriate action, the sources said.
According to Bowmans, the deadline to recover the monies through court action was August 14. That ship has now sailed.
Dladla did not respond to text messages over the week.
Over the entire week of these shenanigans, Eskom refused to comment, citing “employer-employee confidentiality”. But on Saturday night, head of human resources Elsie Pule issued a statement to “set the facts straight against damaging allegations in the public domain”.
Pule confirmed for the first time “that suspensions occurred this week”. Kalima and Mabelane had been given two days to make “written representations” on why their suspension should not be made final.
“Upon receipt of their representations on August 17 2017, the respective line managers of these employees, assisted by HR, considered them and in turn decided to lift the preliminary suspensions,” she said.
However, Pule’s “rectification” contains factual inaccuracies. The signed reinstatement letters obtained by Business Day state Kalima made his written representation on August 14 and had his suspension uplifted on August 16, whereas Mabelane’s representation was dated August 16 — the same day that Singh met with Govender and Martins.
Pule did not explain why the suspension letter prepared for Govender was never handed to him and why Singh was not suspended for the Trillian payments, as recommended by the Bowman report.
This story, like the entire sorry saga of Eskom, is no doubt to be continued over the coming weeks, as a battle is waged for control and survival.
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