MPs tackle SAPS over questionable contracts

Allegations of corruption in the police’s procurement processes were laid bare in the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) yesterday (Wednesday) as MPs grilled the SAPS top brass, writes Legalbrief. MPs have instructed new National Police Commissioner Lieutenant-General Khehla Sitole to terminate contracts awarded to Forensic Data Analysts (FDA) – a firm accused of paying kickbacks to former Acting Commissioner Khomotso Phahlane – and those of other service providers suspected of impropriety. A Business Day report notes Sitole took the hot seat in his first appearance before Scopa in Parliament, during which MPs fired off questions about dubious contracts and administrative shortcomings in the SAPS. An Ipid investigation showed that the police awarded contracts to FDA for services, including the maintenance of SAPS torches at a cost of more than R200 000 a month. Also at issue were images of FDA’s owner – former police officer Keith Keating – and supply chain management officials pictured at a trip to the trophy room of English football club Manchester United’s home stadium, Old Trafford. Ipid and State Information Technology Agency (Sita) officials said they had been subjected to intimidation and threats over the investigations they were conducting into the nature of the relationship between SAPS and FDA. The committee also had a go at the police for failing to get to grips with R5bn worth of contracts it awarded through dubious and improper contracts. Sitole told the committee that police would begin to get to grips with the challenge immediately.

DA Scopa member Tim Brauteseth dropped a bombshell at yesterday’s committee meeting when he provided photographic evidence that SAPS supply chain management members had in 2011 been accompanied by Keating on a visit to Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, six months after Keating had sold forensic camera equipment worth an undisclosed sum to SAPS through Unisys Africa. A Daily Maverick report notes Keating has been a sole supplier to SAPS – through Sita – of a firearm permit system and software as well as forensic equipment worth billions. Brauteseth produced a photograph of two SAPS members posing in Manchester United branded shirts with their names on the back along with Keating and Jerenique Bayard, who was at the time a project director at Unisys, which supplied, through Keating's firm FDA, millions of rands worth of forensic equipment to SAPS.

Yesterday’s Scopa hearing will go down as a turning point in the public exposure of the deep and disturbing extent of the rot in two of the country’s key institutions, SAPS and Sita, notes another Daily Maverick report. Writer Marianne Thamm says it was also a surreal experience as Keating pitched up to sit in on the hearing. According to the report, it was a day of shocking revelations of death threats to senior Sita officials, collapsed financial controls as well as industrial-scale corruption amounting to billions of rand which, suggested Sitole, posed a threat to national security. The report says that after the four-hour grilling, SAPS and Sita vowed to stop or reverse irregular procurements awarded to Keating. The report says it was clear was that the multiparty Scopa members, as well as the chair, Themba Godi, must have agreed beforehand to allow Brauteseth – himself a former forensic investigator – to lead what turned into a deep and unexpected interrogation of SAPS and Sita and how both these institutions have been corroded by wide-scale corruption and malfeasance.