Criminality rife and deeply embedded in Eskom - De Ruyter

CAPE TOWN - Criminality is deeply embedded in Eskom and criminal elements are very well organised.

This is according to outgoing Eskom chief executive Andre de Ruyter, who briefed Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) on Tuesday.

De Ruyter said the organisation was dealing with many challenges, and criminality was high up on the list.

“Criminality, (for example) we know someone has a maintenance contract for mills, there will be rock and metal added to the coal to destroy the mills. We stopped theft of R100 million a month at Tutuka. We affected two arrests, but they were released on R500 bail the following day and the case has not been finalised,” he said.

In other instances, De Ruyter said they have had to write off inventory and when they tried to implement controls by adding bar-coding, it was “resisted” internally.

“Criminality is quite well organised, very deeply embedded. (There is) resistance to implement basic control measures and it goes to extraordinary lengths,” De Ruyter said.

To combat fraud and corruption, he said they had increased governance controls and implemented technology to measure coal quality that would sample every truckload delivered to Eskom.

He added that since the deployment of the defence force, they were seeing greater action from the police.

“There is a criminal justice value chain and prosecutions are equally important. At Camden, Eskom security intercepted a coal truck which contained poor quality coal, the coal had been replaced. The truck driver and manager offered security a R50,000 bribe, which was declined. After approaching the police, he was arrested, made a full confession, however (a) prosecutor released the individual,” De Ruyter said.

He said after the matter was brought to the attention of the Director of Public Prosecutions, they had seen a change.

Eskom said it was experiencing very high levels of plant unreliability and forced outage currently. This is compounded by high planned maintenance.

A number of large generating units are off for extended periods, said Eskom, contributing to the higher plant unavailability and loss of generating capacity.

These include Medupi 4, Kusile 1, 2, 3, Koeberg 1 (planned outage) and Kusile 5 (delayed commissioning).