/ 11 January 1999

PHOSA BACKTRACKS ON PROBE

MPUMALANGA Premier Mathews Phosa has backtracked on public promises to launch an independent commission of inquiry into the province’s embattled parks board. Phosa promised repeatedly in October last year that he would stage an open inquiry into the litany of secret deals engineered by the Mpumalanga Parks Board (MPB) over the past four years. Phosa said this week, however, he had cancelled the commission in favour of a closed forensic audit by Gauteng-based auditors, Gobodo Inc, whose probe will not be open for public scrutiny and will not provide a platform for the public to testify about the MPB’s dodgy schemes, which began with the R25-billion Dolphin deal in 1993.