The R278m tender ‘was above board’

ÜGEN VOS

JOHANNESBURG - Technology Corporate Management (TCM) says it “clearly” received a R278 463 377 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tender “on merit”, and its dealings within Ekurhuleni were all above board.

Ekurhuleni City Manager Khaya Ngema last week tasked the relevant law enforcement agencies to investigate how the municipality managed to “overspend” over 96-and-a-half million rand on the deal, under the leadership of predecessor Patrick Flusk.

This is after The Citizen published details of an explosive external audit report – detailing massive discrepancies and possible collusion between ICT suppliers and senior municipal employees.

The Citizen has been following the allegations of ICT tender-rigging and possible fraud since they first surfaced two years ago, and previously revealed how the third-rated company managed to beat first-rated IBM to the lucrative deal – despite not having the proper certification to do the job.

At the time, the TCM solution was expected to cost the metro R10 million more than IBM, and be implemented 34 weeks over deadline. This project – for a secure network infrastructure with voice over IP capabilities – still isn’t in place.

TCM has accused us of “reckless journalism”, and its competitors of “professional jealousy”.

The preliminary results of the external audit show a complicated web ostensibly linking TCM to several other suppliers, and hints senior municipal employees Nilesh Singh and Andrew Mphushomadi could be “silent partners” in some of these companies. Singh was Ekurhuleni’s executive ICT director and Mphushomadi a senior ICT manager, at the time Ekurhuleni issued a range of lucrative contracts to these entities.

The investigation shows TCM was “directly involved” in the rollout of services from some of these companies and sometimes even did work on their tenders.

It says Singh is Facebook friends with the directors of some of these companies, and perhaps married to the sister of one of these men.

This investigation, by professor Kader Asmal’s audit company Aurco, was itself prompted by a damning internal audit that uncovered non-compliance with Supply Chain Management Policy, misleading tender specifications and “incomplete and misleading” information on TCM’s experience – also previously detailed in The Citizen. The internal audit further questioned how payments could have been made without taking the settlement discount into account (losing the municipality over R1 million), and how the company had received payments for equipment maintenance – before actually delivering the products.

TCM has denied that either Singh or Mupshomadi are “silent partners, shareholders, directors or involved in any capacity” in “TCM or any TCM-related companies”, or that it is closely linked to any of these entities.