Supra Mahumapelo
The Hawks raided the offices of North West Premier Supra Mahumapelo looking for documents related to the multi-million-rand IT contract with Nepo Data Data Dynamics.
The agency’s regional spokesperson Captain Tlangelani Rikhotso told News24 that they were investigating a case of fraud and corruption in the premier’s office. However, he could not divulge further information.
Officers with transparent evidence bags moved from office to office collecting documents believed to be related to several tenders that the provincial legislature’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) was looking into.
“We have been through different departments seizing documents and we found what we were looking for. It’s a very high profile case and we can’t reveal much … there are investigations surrounding several departments in the province,” Rikhotso told City Press.
North West government spokesperson Brian Setswambung confirmed that the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI) arrived at the offices with a search warrant on Thursday morning.
“Nepo Data Dynamics has a three-year contract with the office of the premier, assisting him with rolling out the province’s IT transformation programme,” Setswambung said.
He added that the company was tasked with aligning all government IT systems for the province to ensure that they run seamlessly.
Last week, documents which claimed that the company had been paid R215-million started circulating on social media and this week, the premier’s office was grilled in Scopa on several findings by the Auditor-General, including “R131 994 216 of irregular expenditure” because of a “contravention of supply chain management legislation”.
Setswambung said the province had launched an investigation to establish how the documents were “illegally accessed”.
“Our preliminary investigation shows that people not working for government are enticing junior employees to obtain documents illegally.”
When News24 contacted Nepo Data Dynamics, the person on the phone did not want to be identified, and said the company had no comment about the raid.
The premier is expected to brief the media later on Thursday.
More to follow. — News 24
This article has been amended to reflect updated information.