Don’t let KPMG off the hook too easily

KPMG’s move of repayment is squalid, vile, contemptible, and offensive, writes Jean Michel.

It’s an absolute disgrace that an audit firm of the calibre and stature of KPMG will stoop so low to do the bidding of the Guptas and Sars boss Tom Moyane, and be complicit to corruption by implicating former finance minister Pravin Gordhan and others in a dubious and highly suspicious report.

Now it has been exposed as a fraud and may be going down the tubes like Bell Pottinger, the PR firm from UK that has inflicted so much damage and spread so much bane that affected race relations in this country.

The least KPMG must do to undo the damage is pay an appropriate multimillion-rand compensation.

KPMG had some of its executives resign and offered to pay back its fee of R23 million it had received from Sars.

What a great, noble, honourable and magnanimous gesture! I am sarcastic of course. I should have said that the move of repayment is squalid, vile, contemptible, repulsive and offensive.

Has it considered the damage it has done to the reputation of those individuals, their careers and their families and the pain and anguish to have the Hawks on their doorstep so many times.

And remember just before the budget last year, it wanted to drag Gordhan to court about the socalled “rogue unit”?

The least it must do to expunge and try to undo the damage it has inflicted on the individuals involved, our institutions and the economy as a whole, is pay an appropriate multimillion-rand compensation.

This after an investigation by the criminal justice system when law enforcement agencies could have established the details of the whole sad saga.