The ANC pulled the wool over the public’s eye when it claimed it had filed and served a summons on ex-Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter.
As De Ruyter left his position as Eskom CEO last month, he accused ANC leaders of using the power utility’s huge procurement as a “feeding trough”.
Sunday World can reveal that the ANC has not filed a summons in court despite a claim to the contrary by secretary-general Fikile Mbalula.
This after our repeated attempts to search for the document at the Joburg High Court drew a blank.
The Joburg High Court, which is where the governing party was supposed to have filed the lawsuit against him, falls under the organisation’s jurisdiction because its head office, Luthuli House, is a stone’s throw away from it.
De Ruyter dropped a bombshell late last month, accusing the ANC of being behind corruption at the power utility.
Mbalula rebutted the allegation and claimed De Ruyter had been slapped with a “summons” for making unfounded claims.
The party then chose to claim it was unable locate De Ruyter’s residential address in what appears to be a public relations exercise to allow the matter to dissipate from the public eye.
The ANC’s stunt also got exposed this week when the party opposed a motion for Parliament to establish an ad hoc committee to investigate graft at the state-owned entity as per De Ruyter’s claims.
The governing party opposed the motion with all its 201 MPs that attended the session, while all 115 opposition MPs supported such an investigation.
The position of the ANC on the motion to lift the lid on widespread corruption and sabotage at the power utility was in stark contrast to the organisation’s stated intentions to bring De Ruyter to book.
ANC lawyer Krish Naidoo insisted the party was forging ahead with suing De Ruyter, attributing the delay to the organisation’s inability to trace him.
“We have not issued the summons yet because we are still trying to find Mr De Ruyter. We procured the services of a tracing agent last week and we are still waiting for their report,” he said.
“Once we get that report, let us assume they say they cannot find him, then we have to apply to a court for what we call substituted service to serve the summons by publishing it in a newspaper.”
When it was put to him that a summons needs to be registered with the court registrar and a sheriff dispersed to serve the papers to the defendant, Naidoo said they were avoiding this process to prevent the summons from getting “stale”. “There is a process in law called superannuation, which in
other words means you can issue summons but if you cannot serve it after a certain period of time the summons becomes stale.”
Naidoo said the power utility could not offer any help as De Ruyter is no longer in its employ. Although the company is still in possession of its ex-employee’s residential address, he added, it’s unable to assist owing to the Protection of Personal Information Act.
As for the contradiction between the ANC claiming in public that it was pursuing De Ruyter to name and shame those responsible for Eskom corruption and its opposition to a parliamentary motion seeking to have the same outcome, Naidoo said he was not involved in the latter.
Mbalula said it was “only a matter of days” before the ANC found De Ruyter and brought him to justice. “Do not rush us. We will find the man. Legal matters are complicated because when we rush to court, they will ask us which effort have we taken to find him. By the time we go to court, we must be able to demonstrate that we took steps to find the man. For instance, he has not shown face despite our publicly stated mission that we are looking for him,” said Mbalula.
The administration boss of the governing party told Sunday World there was no contradiction between its pursuit of De Ruyter and opposing the DA motion for an ad-hoc committee. “We were not going to support a DA-sponsored motion because they seek to achieve political outcomes that are different from what we want. So, that thing is not going to happen, never.”
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