S.Africa: White man who was in charge of Electricity: André de Ruyter agrees to appear before Parliament

Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) says André de Ruyter has indicated he is willing to appear in person to answer their questions about his ANC corruption allegations.

This comes after the former Eskom CEO gave an explosive interview to Annika Larsen on E-tv’s My Guest Tonight.

In the interview, De Ruyter said “the evidence suggests” that the ANC used South Africa’s state-owned power utility as a feeding trough.

He told Larsen that he approached a senior minister about a high-level politician involved in sinister and potentially criminal activities at Eskom.

“The minister in question looked at a senior official and said, ‘I guess it was inevitable that it would come out anyway’. It suggests that it was not news,” De Ruyter said.

It later emerged that two senior members of Ramaphosa’s government were implicated in an Eskom corruption investigation and were reported to public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan.

De Ruyter also stated that they know of at least four organised crime cartels in Mpumalanga operating in Eskom, which steal R1 billion monthly.

“Some of them also have an interest in Transnet, which we see in our inability to use rail to get coal to the Majuba power station,” he said.

The four criminal cartels are sophisticated, well-organised, and even adopted language associated with the Mafia, like captains and soldiers.

“They have a hit squad of between sixty and seventy highly trained and well-armed people. People get assassinated in Mpumalanga.”

He said the criminal networks had extended their tentacles to many Eskom workers who sabotage and vandalise power stations on their behalf.

Subsequent media reports indicated that the details about the four criminal cartels was intelligence, not evidence, with several outlets raising questions about how much of the information was accurate.

Eskom’s Kusile power plant flue gas duct failed.

Additionally, De Ruyter alleged that Eskom’s problems at its massive and brand new Kusile power station were due to ANC corruption.

He alleged that system design criteria at Kusile were manipulated to ensure ANC-connected Hitachi Power Africa won the tender.

He said the exhaust gas temperature from the boiler supplied by Hitachi is too high, which was part of the problem at Kusile that ultimately led to a flue gas duct collapse at Unit 1.

As a result of the collapse, units two and three can’t operate.

Eskom hopes to have the units back online by year-end. However, this will require a sulphur dioxide emissions exception and could have significant health consequences for the surrounding community.

“As will become apparent in the near future, there was substantial manipulation of design criteria in order to ensure that Hitachi got that tender,” De Ruyter said.

“But, fact of the matter is, if the contract had initially been awarded correctly, without corruption, we would not have had the severity of load-shedding that we have right now.”

Each unit at Kusile is rated to supply 800 megawatts (MW). Therefore, three could produce up to 2,400MW — enough to mitigate two to three stages of load-shedding.

Scopa provided the following timeline for its communication with De Ruyter:

On 1 March 2023, Scopa received a letter from Mr Bheki Hadebe, MP, requesting the committee to urgently invite De Ruyter to provide more information regarding his allegations.

Scopa resolved to invite Mr de Ruyter to engage with the committee on his allegations regarding corruption, theft, maladministration, sabotage, lack of consequence management, cartels and other financial irregularities at Eskom.

Scopa sent the invitation to De Ruyter on 17 March 2023.

De Ruyter, via legal representatives, agreed to the request. He said he would present a written submission to the committee on the issues he has raised, and is agreeable to appearing before it at a date to be determined by the committee.

“The committee believes that it is important for it to engage with Mr de Ruyter on these issues in line with its constitutional mandate of holding Eskom accountable on matters related to the financial administration of the power utility, including the procurement of goods and services,” Scopa said.

Source: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/486013-andre-de-ruyter-agrees-to-appear-before-parliament.html

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