Outa takes Sanral to court
PROFITEERING?: CONCESSIONAIRES IN FOCUS
Financial statements don’t add up – NGO.
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) suspects long-distance toll concessionaires may be making excessive profits and is taking the SA National Roads Agency (Sanral) to court to obtain the evidence to prove it.
Outa CEO Wayne Duvenage said on Tuesday the organisation had, in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (Paia), formally requested Sanral to provide it with the financial information and contract signed with N3TC, one of the concessionaires, but Sanral did not respond to this request.
The N3TC toll concession route starts at the Cedara interchange in KwaZulu-Natal and ends at the Heidelberg south interchange in Gauteng. Duvenage said 30 days have passed and Outa is now taking this matter to court.
Sanral confirmed on Tuesday that it will be defending the court application.
Sanral marketing and communications general manager Vusi Mona said in terms of Paia, Sanral was obliged to protect the rights of other parties. “In this instance, a mandatory protection is afforded in terms of section 36 of Paia to protect commercial information of third parties [N3TC].
“As section 36 is a mandatory obligation set upon Sanral to protect the commercial information of third parties, Sanral will have no other choice but to defend such an application in accordance with the law.”
Credit to road users may be in order
Advocate Stefanie Fick, head of the accountability division at Outa, said the organisation believed the contracts with long-distance road tolling concessionaire companies must be transparent and their books open to the public. She added that Outa believed there was a possibility that concessionaires could be benefiting from excessive profits, part of which may require credit to the road users in the form of reduced toll fees or returns to Sanral.
Outa acknowledges that public-private partnerships (PPPs) – such as those between the department of transport, Sanral and the concessionaires to build a number of the country’s national road networks – are important. It said these PPPs are known as BOT (build, operate and transfer) concession contracts that enable private companies to build, upgrade and maintain South Africa’s national road network on behalf of Sanral for specific time periods. In the case of N3TC, this is for a period of 30 years.
But Duvenage said these roads are state assets that get transferred back to the state at the end of the concession period, adding all that Outa wanted was absolute transparency.
Duvenage said the concession companies were entitled to make profits but stressed that these profits must be reasonable. “We want to see in the contracts what that entails. We don’t trust Sanral. We never have because of the history and the fact they keep a lot of stuff close to their chests,” he said.
Duvenage added that Sanral’s financial results revealed that it gets a total of R80 million a year from its three concessionaires and “it’s exactly the same amount each year”.
‘Something doesn’t add up’
“This would indicate that little is being done in the annual evaluation of the concessionaire profits, leaving us with a suspicion that the public may not be receiving a fair share of return from these contracts.
“During the past 10 years, the toll tariffs charged by the concessionaires have increased by approximately 80%, yet Sanral has received a fixed amount.
“We know traffic is not the same, we knowe tariffs don’t stay the same, so what is that? Just a stipend? What informs that amount? Something doesn’t add up.
“If the profits are excessive, who is challenging them? Civil society has a right to question this because we pay toll fees.
“If for some reason this has been overlooked and not investigated, we could find that the consortium of people who make up these concessions are taking billions out of the system.”