JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Tuesday 3.30pm.
FOUR board directors on Mpumalanga’s Parks Board (MPB) are threatening the province’s environmental affairs MEC, Fish Mahlalela, with a multi-million-rand libel suit.
MPB board director Rupert Lorimer said on Tuesday that Mahlalela’s dismissal of the board earlier in the day implied that its directors were either dishonest or implicated in a R1,3-billion scandal at the parastatal.
Mahlalela announced at a press conference on Tuesday morning that he had forced MPB chief executive Alan Gray to resign and had dissolved the board after discovering a series of contradictions in its handing of six illegal promissory notes worth R1,3-billion.
Gray began issuing the promissory notes to financial brokers in December last year and illegally used the MPB’s assets as irrevocable and unconditional collateral for offshore loans of between R500-million and R340-million.
Mahlalela said on Tuesday that he had found evidence in board minutes that the body had decided to keep the deals secret from his predecessor, David Mkhwanazi, and had been briefed about the scheme in detail on at least two occasions.
This, he said, was in stark contrast to the board’s present insistence that it was never informed about the promissory notes.
“Mahlalela has branded us as dishonest in radio reports. That is libel because there is no possible way that the board’s five new members knew anything about this issue,” said Lorimer.
“We were all appointed long after this matter was ever discussed and there is even doubt as to whether the old members were ever briefed in the detail mentioned by Mahlalela.” Lorimer said a fifth new board member, Professor L Holtzhausen, might join the threatened action after he returned from a trip to Poland. Board directors currently considering legal action include Lorimer, Brian Shrosbree, Ben Mokoena and Jeremy Anderson.
Lorimer said the decision to allow Gray to resign might prove costly. MPB board chairman, Francis Legodi, added that an initial recommendation that Gray be suspended pending a disciplinary hearing would have been more cost effective and would have been “fairer”.
Gray could not be reached for comment and was reportedly at home preparing his submission to a provincial executive council hearing into the scandal on Wednesday. — African Eye News Service