Swiss engineering company, ABB, moved mountains to deliver its former manager Goetz-Dietrich Wolff as a star witness to testify in the corruption case against former Eskom executive Matshela Koko.
Koko, together with other Eskom executives, is being criminally prosecuted for allegedly receiving kickbacks from Impulse, a company owned by his stepdaughter, which was subcontracted by ABB in a R2-billion contract it scored from the power utility to do work at its Kusile power station.
This when Koko was the parastatal’s chief executive officer.
The company contradicted itself in the reference letter it penned for Wolff and the termination agreement it entered with him. ABB also broke the bank to source the services of SA’s top criminal lawyer, advocate Laurence Hodes SC, to convince Wolff to take the Section 204 witness deal with the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).
It also paid Wolff a golden handshake of R12-million.
Sunday World can reveal ABB did not just pay Wolff a generous exit package; it went to great lengths, telling falsehoods in a rosy reference letter for him to find future employment.
The reference letter, which we have seen, showers Wolff with all sorts of praise, including putting him on a pedestal for the same Kusile deal for which he has admitted criminal liability.
All this was done to secure a statement from Wolff for the NPA’s use to criminally prosecute Koko, among others.
The reference letter ABB wrote for Wolff, which was accompanied by the golden hand shake, claims he left the company “at his own request” on May 31, 2019. The letter said Wolff was an upstanding professional who did not engage in criminality or unethical conduct.
About Wolff’s dealings in South Africa and in the Kusile deal, which he conceded were criminal, the reference letter by ABB attempts to sanitise him.
“Due to his professionalism and absolute trustworthiness, he was generally held in high esteem … Wolff always represented our company (ABB) in the best possible way.”
This claim as contained in the letter, is in sharp contrast to the termination agreement. “The employment relationship shall end at the instigation of the employer through no fault of the employee but due to urgent operational reasons,” reads the termination agreement.
Also minutes of an interview from an internal investigation Wolff did with ABB five months before his exit, show Dirk van Zyl, legal counsel for ABB, saying Wolff “must tell us what he needs from us in order to come clean with the facts”.
In this regard, the rosy and misleading reference letter and exit package were organised for him by the company, and he admitted to being the NPA’s Section 204 witness after serious convincing from Hodes, who was representing the NPA.
“Laurence Hodes SC reiterated that the most important thing here was to secure the deal with the NPA.
“Wolff noted he is worried he cannot prove specific payments and specific dates when certain transactions happened.”
