SA still in dark about Eskom
South Africans who want to know what caused the near collapse of Eskom in the five years to mid-2015 will have a while longer to wait.
This is because the electricity supplier on Tuesday went back on its word to set the record straight and release the report compiled by law firm Dentons to the public.
This also means the people who were fingered for alleged corruption in the report and are thus responsible for the constraints on the economy at the time, are still being protected.
Eskom chairman Ben Ngubane said the utility received legal advice at the last minute that only those who had applied for the document should get it. The utility had wanted to publish the report in order to get “rid of baseless innuendo” and negative publicity.
This leaves South Africans in the dark about the causes the operational and financial near collapse that resulted in the utility running out of cash to pay the salaries of its 49,000 employees and suppliers.
For the first time, Ngubane conceded that the probe was incomplete. In December 2014, the board was forced to inform the government that it would not be able to pay its employees about four months later as it had run out of cash.
In September 2015, the government handed Eskom R23bn in cash for it to continue as a going concern and converted a R60bn loan to shares, which meant Eskom did not have to refund the taxpayer.
In March that year, it had instituted a forensic investigation into its operations to establish why it was suffering daily load shedding and why it had run out of cash. It also needed to investigate huge cost overruns on its new power stations and why their completion was being delayed by five years.
For the probe to proceed Eskom suspended its four top executives including CEO Tshediso Matona, finance director Tsholofelo Molefe and Dan Marokane, who was head of its new infrastructure unit building the stations.
All three later resigned after
negotiating exit packages amounting to R23m.
Eskom said on Tuesday that it had paid Dentons R20m for the probe, not the R27m our sources have mentioned.
On Thursday, our sister publication, Financial Mail, is to publish extracts from the original versions of the Dentons report.
On Tuesday, the company denied having interfered with the investigation but conceded that it had canned the probe after the law firm presented it with an interim report containing allegations of corruption and fraud against some senior executives, board members and suppliers.
Eskom said it would not release the report to the public as those allegations had not been tested. It said it was not willing to investigate if there was any basis to those allegations of malfeasance by its own staff.
“We had to make a trade-off. We could choose whether to continue with a prolonged investigation into a company that was already depressed, which would [further] demoralise staff, or we could fix what was wrong with Eskom,” said Ngubane. The board chose to fix Eskom, “and that is why we today have electricity”, said the Eskom chairman.
Noor Kapdi, the managing partner of Dentons SA, conceded that “the investigation is incomplete by a long shot” and that Dentons was “not entirely satisfied with the report”.
But Eskom was the client, and the law firm acted only on its instructions.
There were still “other areas that warranted further investigation”, he said.
Ngubane avoided questions around whether South Africans were to believe the sanitised version of the report before saying, “the people of SA will believe me because we have delivered”.
ESKOM SAID IT WOULD NOT RELEASE THE REPORT TO THE PUBLIC AS THOSE ALLEGATIONS HAD NOT BEEN TESTED