Palatial offices may be losing bet

WITH just 16 staff members and 1 800m² of office space, the National Gambling Board’s Centurion offices, secured in a R58-million 10-year lease deal, are positively palatial.

The Department of Trade and Industry is now looking for ways to use the “grossly underutilised” space after a forensic investigation determined that the lease, signed in 2012, was irregular.

Briefing parliament’s portfolio committee on trade and industry on the “sorry story” that emerged out of the investigation on Friday, trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said the 1 800m² premises in Eco-Park, Centurion, was more than double the 714m² that the Department of Public Works determined to be sufficient for the board’s needs, three times bigger than the premises it had occupied previously at the DTI campus.

It has previously emerged that the board still had six years remaining on its lease at those premises when it signed the new lease.

Davies said work done by the board, particularly in regulating illegal gambling, had been “woefully inadequate”.

The investigation also revealed that the tender process for the lease had been concluded merely to regularise the lease, and two of the three bidders had been from the same legal entity.

The forensic investigation also highlighted irregularities around the procurement of a national central electronic monitoring system — a potential R1-billion contract that allows the monitoring of limited payout slot machines.

Davies said he had set up a team to look into the matter after it emerged that the “management of the process of appointing the next operator was flawed”. A nine-person subcommittee made up of six board members and three former board members acting as “consultants” had been set up. No minutes or recordings of these meetings exist.

The minister said the investigation had also uncovered excessive board and committee meetings, which resulted in certain members claiming attendance fee increases ranging between 21% and 58%.

Davies said his department was in the process of moving away from the use of boards, and plans were to establish a National Gambling Regulator instead.

The forensic investigation found R3.6-million irregular expenditure and contracts with legal firms, valued in excess of R2-million, cancelled after it emerged that their services had been irregularly procured.

The investigations also revealed that while the board did not have a bank overdraft as alleged, the bank had on five occasions allowed the board to overdraw on its account, with the highest of these totalling R125 000. About R150 000 had also been transferred from the board’s credit card to its current account to ease cash-flow.

The tender process had been concluded merely to regularise lease