Covid-19 PPE looter Roshan Morar dies

Politically connected auditor and disgraced personal protective equipment (PPE) looter Roshan Morar has died in a Pietermaritzburg hospital after a lengthy illness.

Morar, 56, one of the province’s most influential business people, whose connections spanned several successive ANC administrations and cut across the factions in the governing party, died early on Tuesday.

Morar secured a number of key appointments to public entities — including the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) and the Airports

Company of South Africa — during the tenure of former president Jacob Zuma.

At the PIC, he presided over the disastrous investment of R9.4-billion of pension fund money in Steinhoff through the Lancaster Group, owned by former trade unionist Jayendra Naidoo.

At the time, Morar was the director of L101, a Lancaster subsidiary, and the Mpati Commission subsequently found the deal presented a “conflict of interests” and said that “appropriate steps” should be taken over the commission paid to L101 and Lancaster for the transaction.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, his flagship company Morar Incorporated was implicated in PPE looting, along with Amakhono Capital, the investment company of which he was sole director, with both companies settling with the Special Investigating Unit (SIU).

As a result, Morar paid back the proceeds of the two irregular contracts for backpack spray guns and a third, which he was awarded by the department of education to trace “missing” PPE for the department.

Several top officials were found responsible for making the irregular awards by the SIU, which recommended criminal charges and departmental sanction, but education MEC Kwazi Mshengu has challenged the findings.

Mshengu and outgoing premier Sihle Zikalala sit on the board of the Sakhulwazi Foundation, set up by Morar, who had been accused of the capture of the education department’s finance offices by deploying staff to run it during the tenure of former director general Cassius Lubisi.

Lubisi is now chairperson of the Morar Incorporated board.

Shortly before his death, Morar’s fortunes appeared to have been waning. In June, the Kwazulu-natal economic development ministry froze him out as the board chairperson of its Ithala Development Finance Corporation over reputational damage that the PPE controversy had done to the entity.

A R90-million supply-chain management tender awarded by the ethekwini municipality to Morar Incorporated had also been challenged in court by the council’s lawyers, while the company’s appointment to the provincial treasury’s supply-chain management panel was appealed by Corruption Watch.