The State Capture Commission has heard that irregular expenditure at South African Airways (SAA) amounted to almost R5 billion in the 2016/2017 financial year.
Business executive in the Auditor-General’s office Polani Sokombela told the commission that fruitless and wasteful expenditure amounted to R300 million in that financial year.
He says SAA’s contract system is a mess.
“Chairperson this is not a true reflection because I said yesterday we test and select samples. Management is then required to go and look at the whole population.”
“But in this case management tried to go and revise the whole population but they were faced with the same challenges we were faced with.”
SAA missed several deadlines to submit its financial statements to Parliament. Watch below for more:
Meanwhile, former chairperson of the SAA board, Dudu Myeni, has denied that it was solely her responsibility to call a board meeting to finalize an Airbus deal that could have saved SAA billions of rands.
SAA and Airbus negotiated a deal where A320 aircraft would be swapped for A330s, without it costing SAA a cent.
Myeni is appearing in the High Court in Pretoria in the case brought by the Organisation of Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) and the SAA Pilots’ Association to declare her a delinquent director.
OUTA’s advocate, Carol Steinberg, told the court the deal was approved long before the deadline of 15 September 2015.
She says as a formality the board had to give authorization to the CFO and CEO to sign the deal to finalise it.
An email that the CFO Wolgang Meyer sent to Myeni on the day of the deadline urging her to call a board meeting to authorise the final stages of the deal was read in court.
Myeni maintains that the responsibility to call a board meeting was never hers alone.
Click below to watch more on Dudu Myeni’s court case:
