Durban officials backed off from blaming former top eThekwini officials for alleged irregularities in the city administration.
|||Durban - Durban officials on Tuesday backed off from blaming former top eThekwini officials, including municipal manager Michael Sutcliffe, for alleged irregularities highlighted in the Manase Report into fraud and corruption in the city administration.
Sutcliffe, who is suing the present city manager S’bu Sithole for R10 million for defamation, again rubbished the report, saying it was not a “forensic audit”, was a waste of taxpayers’ money and an independent review should be set up to investigate if the city could get back the R15m it paid for it.
He also believed the report served only to “try and rid the municipality of a few of us, committed cadres of the ANC, who had decided to fight against fraud and corruption”.
Last year, Sithole said the city had resolved to pursue criminal charges against Sutcliffe and take legal action to recover R1.1m which, he alleged, had been lost due to Sutcliffe’s failure to report fraud.
Releasing the Manase progress report on Tuesday, Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs MEC Nomusa Dube - who commissioned the investigation - was adamant there were “no criminal charges” against Sutcliffe and that no money would be recovered from him. Instead, it would be recovered from two housing officials who had opened up companies with the sole members being their wives and girlfriends, and had inflated costs to appropriate the money.
The officials had been dismissed - a process which began during Sutcliffe’s tenure - but were appealing.
Dube said disciplinary charges against city treasurer Krish Kumar, for failure to take steps to prevent irregular and wasteful expenditure, had been withdrawn because “he had not been in charge of supply chain management… and it would not be cost-effective” to continue with the hearing.
Former mayor Obed Mlaba, who was fingered for his alleged involvement in a tender for the Waste Volume Reduction Plant at the Bisasar Road Landfill Site in Springfield, has also emerged unscathed as a senior advocate had advised the city that no action could be taken against him.
In a hard-hitting statement Sutcliffe said the report showed no instances of fraud and corruption that had not already been identified and dealt with under his watch.
“No senior managers were found to have been involved at all in doing business with the city or being involved in fraud and corruption,” he said. He could not say the same for councillors and believed that some of the consequences of reporting these transgressions led to him losing his job and having his name “besmirched”.
Sutcliffe also defended his former senior management colleagues, including Kumar, whose disciplinary enquiry, “at great cost to the municipality and Krish personally,” had gone nowhere because both the National Treasury and former auditors said they would support Kumar.
“It also transpired that eThekwini had charged him under a section of the Municipal Finance Management Act that is not applicable.”
Sutcliffe also said former deputy city managers Derek Naidoo and Bheki Mkhize had been pushed out of their jobs when their contracts allegedly expired, while Cogi Pather, the former head of housing, had been trying for seven months to answer allegations, but had eventually resigned.
Jacquie Subban was asked to answer to allegations made in the Manase Report in a disciplinary enquiry. “Yet for over five months there has been no further movement in her case.”
Sutcliffe said the that independent review should also look at all legal costs paid by the municipality in assessing the report, as well as for the disciplinary inquiries of Kumar and Subban and others.
Pather and Naidoo’s alleged transgressions relating to procurement and housing contracts have been referred to the Anti-Corruption Task Team, but no internal disciplinary action would be taken as they were no longer employed by the municipality.
Kumar, who is overseas, could not be contacted for comment while Pather and Naidoo had not commented by time of going to print.
The Mercury