As the Special Investigating Unit prepares for a showdown in court with former Eskom executives – including former chief executive Brian Molefe, former chief financial officer Anoj Singh and former group executive for generation Matshela Koko – Molefe has welcomed the opportunity to detail what transpired at the power utility.
This comes as Eskom and the SIU issued a summons at the North Gauteng High Court on Monday in pursuit of Molefe, Singh, Koko and the Gupta brothers.
The summons is an attempt to recover R3.8 billion which the power utility said had been “lost in a concerted effort corruptly to divert financial resources from Eskom, to improperly and illegally benefit the Gupta family and entities controlled by the said family and their associates” during their 2015 to 2016 acquisition of the operations of Optimum Coal Holdings Limited.
“We do welcome the possibility that we will be able to say in an open court of law exactly what happened but, at the moment, while the matter has not even been heard by the court, while we’re expecting the court to give a fair adjudication it is not right to prejudge the matter,” Molefe said on Wednesday.
“We are looking forward to expressing our side of the story, the right to be heard. The right to hear the other side is a natural justice right.”
In an interview with television news channel Newzroom Afrika, Molefe denied the allegations levelled against him, among them corruption, enabling and facilitating certain deals for the Gupta brothers and nepotism. He said there was no evidence to back up the allegations.
Molefe said that whenever such allegations surfaced against him and those accused with him, they were never given an opportunity to present their side of the story in an open and appropriate forum where the matter could be ventilated openly.
He said he had not been served with the summons and believed that the SIU and Eskom had opted to go public with the summons before they had seen the papers.
“This is very unusual, normally in a civil proceedings before you issue a summons, before you go to court to demand payment, you must issue a letter of demand.
“They have not given us letters of demand to say that this is their side of the story and that this is the dispute that they have with us and therefore they are demanding payment,” Molefe said.
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Source: IOL
