Prasa dismisses five officials and suspends five others for financial misconduct

The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa recently dismissed eight officials on various charges of financial misconduct.

There were five others that have been suspended last month pending investigations by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU).
This is according to the report Prasa tabled to the meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

The report, which was tabled by acting chief procurement officer Willie Mathebula, said four senior officials in the protection services department were dismissed for procurement related irregularities in the awarding of security contracts.

It also said four officials with ranks ranging between assistant manager and manager in the engineering services department were dismissed on charges of procurement-related irregularities.

“Five officials from Prasa Cres have been suspended in February 2021, pending the outcome of the SIU investigation on Isipingo Retail Development project,” the report said.

According to the report, the entity was undertaking further investigations and disciplinary processes against officials in various departments for procurement-related irregularities.
It revealed that the SIU was investigating 28 matters in the entity and has seconded resources to assist with Material irregularities picked up by the Office of the Auditor-General.
The Hawks was investigating 21 cases emanating from the Public Protector’s Derailed Report.

“Eighteen further case dockets have been opened for matters contravening the Public Finance Management Act by the Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation,” the report said.

Briefing the Scopa meeting, Mathebula said Prasa has made deviation of contacts in 2019-20 and five for variation of contracts. National Treasury did not support six deviation applications and gave conditional support to four on conditions were met.

It approved three variations of contracts and did not support one while two contracts were approved internally by Prasa.

He said in a majority of application deviations where the National Treasury did not approve, Prasa also did not proceed with those projects.

Mathebula, however, said there was an application for a deviation made to Treasury to make use of the services of Transnet.

“Treasury wanted additional information on that particular application but for some reason, Prasa went ahead and partly implemented,” he said.

Departments and entities are required to apply to the National Treasury for deviation and variation of contracts if there is an emergency and the tender can’t go through the normal bidding process.

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Source: IOL

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