Faked ‘racism’ – MiWay to lay charges

MiWAY WILL lay criminal charges and a civil suit against the client it believes is responsible for the “extremely fake” e-mail, which seemingly demonises black people as “baboons”.

This was the warning delivered by Rene Otto, chief executive of the insurance company.

Otto was reacting to a screen grab of an e-mail which surfaced on social media sites yesterday, where a claims assessor at the firm is alleged to have written that a managers meeting had resolved to “reject 90% of claims made by black people as from August 1, 2017”.

“They (black people) are an easy target, its also a great opportunity to save money and also punish these black baboons (sic).”

However, a fuming Otto told The Star that the person responsible for this “extremely fake e-mail” was a client of theirs, who had a claim rejected as the assessor was not satisfied with the explanation for the claim.

Therefore, MiWay will, Otto stressed, deal with the client legally.

“We will take criminal and civil steps against this individual,” said the chief executive.

“I haven’t applied my mind as yet, but I cannot imagine that there isn’t some criminal consequence here and, definitely, reputational damage from a civil law point of view. We will also definitely take (civil) action,” Otto stressed.

He added that The Star had spoken to him an hour after he got wind of the e-mail image, and had yet to discuss how exactly they were going to proceed with the mooted legal action.

“Personally, I would love to lay criminal charges against someone who does something like this because I cannot, in my wildest dreams, think that you can do something like this and get away with it.”

Otto could not be drawn into either providing the identity of the alleged client, or detailing what the claim was for.

He did, however, explain how the insurance firm deduced who they believed was the original source of the “fake” e-mail image, and how this was done.

“It goes back to a claim that we were validating and, in the process of validating, you often send out e-mails to a client to ask for more information. So, we were not satisfied with the client’s explanation and we ended up not paying the claim,” Otto explained.

“The client obviously got hold of an e-mail with a MiWay person’s e-mail signature on it and was then able to manipulate this thing.”

Asked whether the e-mail address that appears in the image was indeed a MiWay address, Otto said he could not comment because he had yet to scrutinise the image at the time of the interview.

But he was scathing about a reporter he said put an image of the claims assessor’s Facebook profile on social media. The employee was advised by managers to move in with her parents due to the harassment she was facing.

“We are just a bit concerned, or maybe overprotective, but we would rather be safe than sorry. Her physical address is now on social media – and there are people who might just do stupid things.”

We will take criminal and civil steps against this individual