Mungo Soggot
A row is brewing between Transparency International’s South African arm and the Berlin-based secretariat of the international anti-corruption group after it revoked the South Africans’ mandate to run this week’s anti-corruption conference in Durban.
It has emerged that the organisation’s secretariat in Berlin cancelled the mandate of the South African branch to run the conference in May. Transparency International South Africa had been mandated by Berlin to run the conference and hire organisers. Both sides’ lawyers are currently trying to negotiate a settlement.
The Berlin secretariat also axed the South African company recruited to run the conference. The company, Contact Conference Agency, which had been hired by Transparency International South Africa two years earlier, had been preparing the conference until then.
Contact Conference Agency’s Margaret Lssel said the organisation had yet to provide her with any reasons for her dismissal, but had merely informed her in writing that her services were no longer required.
Lssel said because of her involvement in preparing the Durban conference, she had passed over several other jobs. She said that after she was taken off the contract, she had had to cancel all the bookings she had made for the conference – including mass reservations for delegates at top Durban hotels.
Lssel’s lawyers are now drawing up a claim for R314 000 in lost commissions and lost work.
The chief executive officer of Transparency International South Africa, Stiaan van der Merwe, confirmed there had been a dispute between his organisation and its German headquarters, saying that the secretariat had not “furnished reasons formally for the decision to revoke the mandate”.
Van der Merwe said all the parties’ lawyers would start negotiating soon to “sort out the financial part of the problem”. He referred the Mail & Guardian to the organisation’s media representative, Karl Mohn, for further comment.
Mohn, who was at the conference this week, played down the dispute: “It is not a big issue, there is nothing political here. There were some problems, but they were all sorted out.”
Mohn said he did not know at which level of the organisation’s secretariat the decision to pull the plug on the South Africans had been taken. “It was a management decision,” he said. “The International Anti-Corruption Conference Council [the controlling body of the conference] was dissatisfied [with the South African involvement].”
Transparency International sources in the group’s Southern African operations this week said that the intervention by Berlin was symptomatic of the “north/south dynamic” in the organisation. One source dismissed the suggestion that Berlin’s intervention was not “political”, and said there was little respect in Berlin for the South African and other Third World Transparency International operations.
“There seems to have been a complete lack of transparency in this case about how they have dealt with this dispute,” added the source.