‘I have had to sacrifice my salary’

DOREEN Vilakazi is in an uncomfortable position. Arriving at Trubok as a saviour of sorts, she is now battling claims that she is to blame for the company being on its last legs.

“They are talking about our cars, our house,” she said yesterday. “We had these things before we went into this business. If only they knew that I, too, have had to sacrifice my salary at times to keep this company going.”

Vilakazi said she and her husband, Jerry, had decided to buy the clothing company in an effort to save jobs. They had been approached by executives after the previous owners decided to pull out.

“If I had to do it again, I probably wouldn’t,” she said.

Asked what had gone wrong, she said: “Well, the big orders we were promised were just not there after we arrived.”

Some former senior staff said Doreen did not understand the business or the industry. “She arrived and suddenly we had all this MBA-speak, but there were no zips or cloth,” said one.

Within months of Doreen’s arrival, some former staff said, a batch of new individual corporate credit cards were handed out.

Suspicions arose when the statement for a company credit card in Doreen’s name listed purchases that included 2010 Soccer World Cup tickets to the value of R4 480, Chicken Licken

Some managers had set up parallel importing businesses and were supplying cheap imports

meals worth R310, Woolworths items worth R592 and a Pick n Pay bill for R1 996.

Doreen said the credit cards were no longer in use. If they had been used for personal expenses, she would have been billed for them, she said. “I would have paid that myself.”

The company might be struggling today, said Doreen, but there was work for staff on the factory floor because Palama Investments has a diverse portfolio. One of its other companies, Kazzi Corporate Wear, secured funding last year from the National Empowerment Fund to produce uniforms for SA Express airline and Netcare hospitals.

Several former staff members at the company’s Newcastle factory, Sandown Clothing, have described the funding from the empowerment fund as “a life-saver”.

“When the money came in, we could pay the lights and water at the factory,” said one former senior staff member.

The fund said on Friday it did disburse an R8.5-million loan to Kazzi Corporate Wear for which Trubok Holdings, “an associate company”, stood surety.

“The funding was for working capital to enable the company to supply corporate uniforms to SA Express and Netcare hospitals,” said spokesman Moemise Motsepe, adding that the fund could not release further details because of confidentiality obligations.

The Vilakazis are the direc- tors of Kazzi Clothing, and Jerry is nonexecutive chairman of Netcare.

Netcare said yesterday that a “process of absolute transparency was followed in disclosing the ownership of Kazzi Corporate Wear”.

Doreen said she was “at a loss” amid the growing attacks on her integrity as she battled to keep Trubok in business and save as many jobs as possible.

“Those are the people I have to worry about. It would be easy for me to walk away, but I have to think of them,” she said.

She said the money of staff who were members of the provident fund was not in jeopardy. The company had switched to a better fund run by Liberty Life, she said.

Asked if she felt she had been betrayed by the same people who had asked her to save the company, she said: “Well, by the time of the conclusion of the deal, some executive managers of Trubok had already set up parallel importing businesses and were supplying cheap imports from China.”— André Jurgens and Jessica Bezuidenhout