Fraud and corruption are eating through taxpayers’ money

I WAS pleasantly surprised to see Independent Media, through the Cape Times, follow the Sunday Times’s example of reporting on an alleged mansion somewhere in Dubai.

What I do know is that City Press reported on this same mansion a year ago and referred to it then as the Gupta mansion. Without any substantive evidence whatsoever, the mansion now appears to have changed hands and is alleged to be owned by President Zuma.

I am unable to respond to conjecture but can comment on some more pressing matters closer to home.

Before our democracy in 1994, it is common knowledge that approximately R26 billion was stolen, laundered and held offshore illegally by apartheid-era bankers, arms dealers and senior politicians (source: the Ciex Report). Our taxpayers’ money has never been recovered.

About a week ago, ANN7 submitted a breaking news report about a massive cover-up involving a well-known auditing firm and the National Treasury.

In what can only be described as wasteful and fruitless expenditure bordering on fraud and corruption, no contract was entered into, there were no supply chain management processes in place, unauthorised and irregular expenditure/ payments were effected and, in the short space of 17 months, R139 million of a R145m budget was already spent with 43 months still left of the invisible contract. This was an internal audit report that escaped the attention of no less than two minsters of finance who are both, thankfully, no longer in office. I do not recall Independent Media covering this grand larceny.

And then, on April 12, the Cape Times carried a riveting article “Accomplices to financial murder” by Rhodes lecturer Wesley Seale. The auditor-general acknowledged a festering problem vis-à-vis capital being illegally transferred out of our country. Global Financial Integrity, a Washington research and advocacy group was more blunt and reported that South Africa had lost more than one and a half trillion rand in illicit financial flows between 2003 and the end of 2012 alone.

As a loyal taxpaying citizen, I am not interested in fake mansions in another country where ownership has not been proven. I am more concerned about our fiscus and support national government’s intention to investigate every facet of State Capture before and after 1994.

I expect the media to report without fear or favour as our real challenge is to break the hold of White Monopoly Capital and all its surrogates. Colin Arendse Wynberg