Moyane’s wild forays ensured his removal
• Accountable only to Zuma, his machinations at SARS made it a hotbed of corruption and reduced its capacity
The struggle to remove suspended South African Revenue Service (SARS) commissioner Tom Moyane from his position is unprecedented for the institution and the country.
Moyane’s time at the helm of SARS took on peculiar characteristics from its start in 2014. It was the first time a commissioner bucked against reporting to the finance minister, and he held on to this position with all three ministers under which he served: Nhlanhla Nene, Pravin Gordhan and Malusi Gigaba.
It was with this cloak of arrogance, a stream of refrains claiming victimisation, together with a mind-blowing lack of accountability that he slowly wove his own demise.
Moyane’s story in many ways mimics that of the man who appointed him, former president Jacob Zuma — except that the former commissioner’s tenure was far shorter.
The South African Revenue Service Act of 1997 was amended in 2002 so that the power to appoint the commissioner was shifted from the finance minister to the president. However, the commissioner was expected to continue reporting directly to the finance minister.
When Gordhan was SARS commissioner he reported to then finance minister Trevor Manuel. His successor, Oupa Magashula, reported to Gordhan. Never did the SARS commissioner report directly to the president until Moyane.
After Magashula departed, more than 100 applications were received for the commissioner’s post, some from inside SARS. This process to appoint a new leader for SARS began shortly before the 2014 election.
Moyane was not among the applicants, but his appointment was announced by Zuma four months after his new Cabinet was appointed, in which Gordhan was replaced by Nene.
From the start, Moyane’s tenure at SARS was driven by a very particular purpose, the motives becoming clear only during his third year in office.
In his first week he dissolved the SARS eight-member executive committee, and the following five months rang in a whirlwind of changes. In his second month he suspended then deputy Ivan Pillay as well as head of strategy Peter Richer. While there was already a plan in place for a review of the operating model, Moyane appointed consultants to implement the restructuring, which, in the end, marked a massive shift from the envisioned changes.
Nene appointed the Kroon advisory committee headed by retired judge Frank Kroon to, according to Treasury at the time, “propose strategic and business plans, goals and measures relating to those plans; operational and organisational plans, including modernisation of technology systems, training, and reorganisation of business units; and budget to ensure that the budget supports the revenue and customs authority’s strategic and business plans”.
The Kroon committee was also tasked with dealing with media reports of an alleged “rogue unit”, which became its immediate task.
Warning signs emerged when conflicted individuals were appointed to sit on the Kroon committee — the beginning of what later became a trend for SARS under Moyane.
The devices he employed included appointing a committee, board or law firm to undertake investigations, with the processes being far from fair or comprehensive. Moyane would then announce far-reaching consequences as a result of a botched or compromised probe.
The Kroon committee simply accepted the rogue unit narrative without conducting any investigations. It recommended criminal charges against those “implicated” in the alleged unit.
It was on the strength of the Kroon findings that Moyane laid criminal charges against former SARS employees, which led to the National Prosecuting Authority’s hounding of Gordhan with a list of 27 questions on the eve of the February 2016 budget. The charges were subsequently dropped.
The KPMG report on the alleged rogue unit was another example of the Moyane way of conducting business. In December 2014, despite a previous investigation failing to directly implicate Pillay in the alleged rogue unit, Pillay was suspended on “the advice of senior counsel and work by KPMG”.
KPMG botched that report and retracted “parts of it”, although the entire report is littered with inconsistencies. The embattled firm has returned the R23m SARS paid it.
International law firm Hogan Lovells was also drawn into Moyane’s machinations when he appointed it to investigate allegations of unusual and suspicious financial transactions made by his then second-incommand, Jonas Makwakwa.
Moyane tripped himself up badly when he suspended Makwakwa and appointed the firm to conduct the probe four months after receiving a Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) report — only after it was exposed in the Sunday Times.
In doing so, Moyane violated the SARS Act and the Financial Intelligence Centre Act with his suspect handling of the FIC report on Makwakwa’s suspicious transactions.
A year later he triumphantly announced Makwakwa’s return to SARS after the suspended official was cleared of all charges. But on the same day Hogan Lovells issued a statement saying it did not investigate the suspicious transactions. The trend is clear. Announcing Makwakwa’s resignation last week, Moyane admitted he could have handled the matter differently. He made a similar admission after it emerged a company linked to his nephew was handed a R220m contract for debt collection by SARS during his tenure.
Approached by the media about his nephew, Moyane said he was unaware of it and SARS immediately went to court to overturn the contract with Lekgotla Trifecta Collections — a consortium that included his nephew’s company Lekgotla Outsourcing along with Trifecta Capital Collections.
The Mail & Guardian quoted Timothy Marshall, Trifecta Capital Collections CE at the time, on its story about the debt collection deal. The Daily Maverick’s report on the valueadded tax refund to the Guptas, in which Moyane was allegedly personally involved, said it was paid into the account of Terbium Financial Services, a company of which Marshall is a director.
SARS released a new list of its debt collectors two weeks ago. Among the companies contracted by the institution was New Integrated Credit Solutions, which was listed in the FIC’s report on Makwakwa’s suspicious and unusual transactions as one of the companies channelling money into his accounts. It was only when confronted with this allegation that Makwakwa resigned — with full benefits.
After Zuma’s resignation, Moyane continued to act with impunity, bucking against Parliament’s attempt to obtain the reports into Makwakwa’s disciplinary process — which says absolutely zilch about the suspicious and unusual deposits into his bank account.
It is no wonder, then, that Moyane did not want to account to three finance ministers.
Business Day is reliably informed that he met Gigaba on only two occasions during his year-long tenure as finance minister. Gigaba had announced an inquiry into the tax collector but was blocked by Zuma.
The machinations of the disciplinary process against Moyane have yet to be announced but it will have to dig deep to unravel the mess he left behind at the tax agency.
An even greater worry is that Moyane found allies when he came to SARS who were complicit in his conduct. Makwakwa had been employed at the agency for more than two decades but quickly became his new boss’s staunchest ally.
Moyane and Makwakwa did not act alone, so the process of cleaning up SARS is likely to be a far-reaching one, particularly considering that more than 50 senior managers have left the organisation since 2014.
While Moyane may push back against his suspension and disciplinary process, the hairraising allegations he may be subjected to could see him fighting not only for his job but for his freedom.