For EOH CEO Stephen van Coller, giving evidence before the Zondo commission last week was a relief as it drew a line under the corruption scandal at the company.
"The Zondo commission was a huge relief for us because it means we are getting to the end of all of this," said Van Coller, who was brought in to turn the company around in September 2018.
Speaking this week after the release of results for the year to end-July, Van Coller said he hoped the Special Investigating Unit and the Zondo commission would now be able to use the evidence submitted by EOH to take action against culprits.
This in turn would help EOH in its planned civil case against former employees and companies that benefited from about R865m paid to contractors for work that cannot be accounted for.
Van Coller said civil cases generally follow the criminal ones and it could, "sadly", take a couple of years to see if it is possible to get back some of the money looted from EOH.
"The problem is it looks like the money got paid to multiple people and so it's disappeared all over the place. What we've done is issued a summons against who we think are the main perpetrators and their companies and there is a process that is happening at the moment.
"At some point we will need to decide, is there a reasonable prospect of recovering the money and how much money are we prepared to spend to recover it because I can only do a civil claim?"
The damage to EOH's reputation has been severe. Perhaps the most publicised fallout was US software giant Microsoft terminating a contract with EOH in February last year in the wake of allegations of corruption linked to a legacy software supply contract between a government department and one of EOH's businesses.
Van Coller said EOH has settled with the Special Investigating Unit on the Microsoft contracts and is paying back R42m "relating to over-invoicing" in this regard.
EOH will also have to pay back other former clients for over-invoicing.
Van Coller said it was difficult to link irregular payments and invoicing to specific contracts.
"You have to be careful trying to link the payments to specific contracts. This was rather a looting of EOH to be able to make donations and then hopefully influence winning some contracts."
Some prominent political figures have been implicated in the EOH scandal, including Johannesburg mayor Geoff Makhubo and state security deputy minister Zizi Kodwa.
Van Coller said payments to Makhubo's company, Molelwane, were included in the R865m that had been flagged by EOH.
"The payments to Zizi Kodwa were from Jehan Mackay's [former EOH director] private bank account. We just happened to see those because he sent his bank statements across the EOH network and so they get recorded. I don't know why he did that, whether it was for a visa application or for whatever.
"Clearly when we had a look at the payments - when we saw his bank accounts - the payments were at very difficult times [in negotiations] around tenders, if I can put it like that."
Van Coller said he received positive feedback from top CEOs and government officials after his frank testimony to the commission about the widespread corruption and fraud uncovered at EOH.
"People say, when are you going to get this scandal behind you? From where I sit it's long behind us and this is the feedback we are getting from corporates. It has been quite positive for us. It's a new EOH, with a new management team and there are new opportunities and we have our accounts largely under control."
The company's latest results also show it to be in a better position.
EOH's debt at November 30 was just over R2bn, from the R4.1bn when Van Coller joined the company.
"We just made massive progress. Obviously halving the debt and interest rates being significantly down make a big difference to our ability to manage our debt," said Van Coller.
Previously the group had to rely on selling off assets to reduce debt. But as the company managed to generate more than R700m of cash at an operating level, it can now pay down debt and interest from these resources.
Van Coller said this represented a cash conversion of 85% on R827m of normalised earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda). A cash conversion ratio is an important measure of how efficient a company is at turning ebitda into actual cash.
Peter Armitage, CEO of Anchor Group, said that if EOH had not brought in someone like Van Coller, "this whole company could have collapsed in a heap".
"I think he has done an amazing job. In a services business absolutely everything is about your customer and the confidence in the future of the business. He was able to restore confidence. He's been able to retain clients and get them to give the company another chance," said Armitage.
Lebashe Investment Group, owner of Arena Holdings, which publishes the Sunday Times, is a shareholder in EOH.
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