Eight council employees in the Ekurhuleni Municipality have defrauded the government of R120-million over the past year and imposed “apartheid-like” segregation at their workplace, an internal forensic investigation has found.
The Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, which includes Alberton, Edenvale, Kempton Park, Tembisa, Benoni and Germiston, is among the five biggest in the country with an annual budget of R8-billion.
The investigation, conducted by internal forensic investigators and assisted by Robert McBride, chief of the Ekurhuleni Metro Police, resulted in charges of fraud, theft and corruption being brought against the eight municipal employees.
They are: Petros Daffue, acting transportation manager in the municipality; Frans Erasmus, municipal workshop foreman; Dirk van Loggerenberg, municipal workshop manager; Hennie Viljoen, municipal workshop manager; Andre Steinhobel, municipal mechanic; Leon Steinhobel, municipal workshop foreman; Marteens Erasmus, regional fleet controller; and Sonette Paulsen, municipal workshop employee.
Daffue, Frans Erasmus, Van Loggerenberg and the Steinhobel brothers resigned when they were presented with the charges.
Durban advocate Roshan Dehal is prosecuting in the disciplinary hearing against the remaining three.
Presiding officer Percy Sonn, an advocate and former head of the Scorpions, has recommended that the incidents of fraud amounting to R120-million, according to forensic documentation obtained by the Mail & Guardian, be referred for criminal investigation. The matter has been handed to the Scorpions.
The corruption charges in this case relate to the management of the Alberton Workshop, an Ekurhuleni Municipality controlled entity, tasked with the maintenance of council vehicles and other mechanical work. According to McBride, eight other municipal workshops are currently under investigation for similar corruption.
According to the forensic documentation, over the past year the group of municipal employees has:
- outsourced municipal work on a massive scale from the Alberton Workshop to favoured suppliers;
- wrongly “scrapped” municipal assets, such as vehicles “in return for reward from the recipients, who are service providers to the Alberton Workshop”; and
- outsourced work to service providers “whereby work instructions for unnecessary work on vehicles are inspected and approved for payment”.
“The benefits received [from the favoured service providers] range from tickets to sporting events, paid for holidays and cash,” according to the forensic documentation.
The forensic investigation found that three out of 20 service providers (Impala Motor Repairs, Big Tree Motors and Waste Truck Repairs) had received more than 55% of all workshop outsource payments from 2003 to 2005.
Another example shows how an Isuzu one-tonne pickup truck was serviced during September 2004 at a cost of R246 589, which exceeds the estimated market value of the truck by 80%.
One service provider was found by the Ekurhuleni Metro Police to have council vehicles, estimated at R2-million, hidden on its property, which had unnecessarily been scrapped by the workshop.
“We cannot quantify how much has been lost … the R120-million is simply the most tangible figure of unauthorised expenditure as a result of all the fraud by these individuals. But it is just a drop in the ocean; the networks run much deeper,” said McBride.
He explained that some of the individuals had been working for the municipality for over 20 years and had “created an environment of corruption that had made this all possible”.