Zuma’s friend scored big in R1 billion water contract: report
A friend of president Jacob Zuma – who once offered to pay the president’s Nkandla bill and establish the Friends of Jacob Zuma Trust to raise funds for his fraud and corruption trial – received an R81 million advance on a R1 billion water contract, the City Press reports.
Former mayor of Greytown in KwaZulu-Natal and construction magnate, Philani Mavundla, received the R81 million payment before his company had even broken ground on the project – which is against the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), the paper said.
The project in question was for an acid mine drainage plant in Springs, east of Johannesburg, which was one R1 billion project of several, totalling a combined R12 billion.
The contract was awarded to Mavundla by the Trans Caledon Tunnel Authority (TCTA), which falls under the department of water and sanitation. The facility has since been completed, but the question of advance payments is only now being raised.
According to sources from the TCTA speaking to the City Press,projects at the company have gone largely overlooked by the media and the public, and people were ‘carrying money out of this institution in bags’.
The City Press reported that it had seen other invoices showing the TCTCA also paying other companies in advance for work not yet started or completed.
It was also revealed that, in Mavundla’s case, his company was still being paid monthly installments as recently as three months ago, for vague items such as R42 million for an “operations and maintenance” contract which did not go out to tender.
The TCTA told the City Press that the advance payments were part of and laid out in the contracts with the companies, and that all the questionable practices, such as non-tendered contracts and extensions thereof, were approved by National Treasury.
You can read the full report in the City Press.
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