Makate billions a mistake – Vodacom
Please Call Me inventor says the company knows that it owes him billions
Mobile telecommunications giant Vodacom says amounts totalling more than R63bn, which were filed as invoices in their system bearing the name of Please Call Me inventor Nkosana Makate were a mistake that was later rectified.
This is contained in the company’s court papers filed ahead of next month’s oral arguments in a review application by Makate asking the court to set aside a R47m settlement offered by the company.
In October, Teboho Motaung, a former senior accountant at Vodacom, who was responsible for calculating Vodacom’s business partners’ commissions, indicated in an affidavit that the company would pay Makate R63bn.
Vodacom, at the time rejected this as “false and deliberately misleading” claims that it had purportedly provided for a sum of R63bn as cover for its potential liability in the case.
But in the latest court papers, the company stated that the matter of invoices on its IT system – Taulia – bearing Makate’s name are “irrelevant and inaccurate” as the invoices and amounts reflected were issued by mistake.
“The system made certain miscalculations resulting in fees of a few thousand rand to be reflected on the system as billions of rand.
“These errors were identified by Vodacom’s financial operations department and were reversed on the Taulia system,” Vodacom’s court papers state.
Makate has argued that Vodacom knew that it owed him billions of rand, however, CEO Shameel Joosub still offered him only R47m in compensation for his idea in January 2019.
The inventor argued that invoices issued via the Taulia system bearing his name and that of the lawyers representing Vodacom in the matter, Leslie Cohen Attorneys Inc, were proof that Vodacom knew exactly what it owed him.
He labelled Vodacom’s IT system as “sophisticated” and that purchasing orders and invoices thereof underwent various tiers of approval before being issued through supplychain management, including approvals from the CFO and CEO, depending on the amounts.
“After approval, the PO [purchasing order] is sent electronically by Vodacom through the Taulia system to the supplier (such as Leslie Cohen Attorneys), who has to create a mirror invoice of the approved PO,” Makate argued.
“It is therefore impossible for the ‘errors’ to have occurred 5 times between November 2015 and February 2016 from Leslie Cohen’s office, as a service provider cannot load an invoice on the Taulia system without an internally approved PO from Vodacom.”
Makate also proposed a model, which he argued should be considered by Vodacom in fairly calculating a reasonable compensation, which he estimated at about R10bn before interest, but which rose to R30bn including interest payable from June 2007.
Vodacom has dismissed Makate’s model arguing that it grossly exaggerated revenue made from Please Call Me by Vodacom.