Eskom: Guptas, Zuma, Gigaba fingered
THE heat is on for the Guptas, with more senior people at Eskom pointing fingers at the family, President Jacob Zuma and cabinet ministers involved in state capture.
Former Eskom chief executive Brian Dames and another former employee said the looting began several years ago when Eskom took a different direction and began flouting governance procedures.
Dames, who worked for Eskom for 27 years before he was pushed out, told the inquiry into state capture in Parliament yesterday he was left fuming after meeting the Guptas after they proposed they be awarded coal contracts by the power utility.
Another former Eskom employee and consultant, Ted Blom, who is now with the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse, said he met Zuma in 2008 at his Forest Town house in Johannesburg, where the president told him to meet the “fixer team”.
But he too was left fuming after the “fixer team” told him they wanted to “eat at Eskom”.
Blom did not name the fixer team, but said it comprised “eminent persons, including doctors and lawyers”.
He has promised to send the list of the team to Parliament.
Zuma’s spokesperson, Bongani Ngqulunga, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
But Dames said his tenure at Eskom became difficult after a new board was appointed in 2010 following the appointment of Malusi Gigaba as public enterprises minister.
Dames complained of interference by some of the former chairpersons of Eskom in the operations of the power utility. “The engagement with the Guptas, I was asked to meet with them. I was asked by minister Gigaba’s adviser Siyabonga Mahlangu. He asked me to meet some people. After this meeting I was very angry. I asked Mahlangu never to bring these people again. It was a strange discussion. There was a request for coal contracts,” said Dames.
The meeting took place at Sahara Computers offices in Midrand, he said. But Dames said he did not recall which of the Gupta brothers he met then.
The lawyer for the Guptas, Gert van der Merwe, referred questions to family spokesperson Gary Naidoo, who had not responded to questions by the time of publishing.
When asked by the committee, Dames said it was inappropriate for Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane to be involved in the purchase of Optimum mine from Glencore by the Guptas.
Blom also told the committee how Zuma had referred him to a fixer team that told him they wanted to “eat at Eskom”.
“I think all those people are identifiable. There were six people. They were all eminent persons, they were all lawyers and doctors,” said Blom.
He said he had been at a meeting with Zuma at 11pm after waiting for hours at his house in Forest Town. This was before he was named president.
“We were part of a queue of people meeting him. At that meeting I handed out (sic) irregularities in the coal account,” he said. Zuma referred him to a fixer team.
“The current president, before he was president, said he was going to be corruption fighter number one. I went to his house in Forest Town,” he said.
Later, he met with the fixer team in Midrand. “I went to Midrand to meet with the fixer team, where they asked me, to use my words ‘how they could join the gravy train’. I left that meeting because I was so disgusted,” Blom said. He also accused Eskom of wasting billions of rand every year.
He said the power utility had revalued its assets from R200 billion to R743bn as part of financial engineering. The R3bn in irregular expenditure at Eskom is a drop in the ocean. The build programme for Medupi escalated from R32bn in 2005 to a staggering R91bn, he said. The same applied with Kusile power plant where costs had more than doubled.