Fidentia’s interim curators failed to arrive at a meeting with about 50 former Fidentia employees at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation, and Arbitration (CCMA) on Monday.
In a statement on behalf of the employees, Fidentia’s former spokesperson, Ross Edwards, said the curators — Dines Gihwala and George Papadakis — were informed of the meeting, but failed to appear.
The CCMA commissioner appointed to the case, Leon Levy, had contacted Gavin Stansfield, a director of Gihwala’s law firm.
Edwards said former Fidentia employees claimed Stansfield had ”been frantically fast-tracking” the retrenchments of between 450 and 600 employees without following the most basic conditions of employment.
”Stansfield claims that official notice of Monday’s Fidentia CCMA hearing, which was faxed to the address given by the interim curators, must simply have gone astray.”
The group of retrenched Cape Town employees was being represented by the Professional Trade Union of South Africa.
Many of the applicants in Monday’s ”mass-action appeal” were dismissed with no pay for two weeks’ work in February and received no benefits and no severance pay, Edwards said.
In Johannesburg, some Fidentia employees were dismissed as late as February 23, with no pay or retrenchment packages after working for the curators for one month.
”The interim curators’ timing in their case was especially harsh, coming just before pay day.”
Half the staff had been fired with nothing, and the remainder paid their full February salary, he said.
The Fidentia group of companies managed investments on behalf of the public, including large pension funds. R680-million is unaccounted for. — Sapa