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Suspended SAA treasurer Cynthia Stimpel resumes her battle against the state-owned carrier at an internal hearing this week, where she is being accused of insolence.
SAA slapped four charges on Stimpel (58) on July 28 this year, accusing her, among other things, of unlawfully disclosing and accessing company documents and sending a colleague a defamatory message.
A labour court hearing on three of the four charges against her will resume on August 22. The other charge is being considered separately on Wednesday.
In her replying affidavit to SAA, made available to City Press, Stimpel admits the charges but argues she did so under the Protected Disclosure Act, or “whistle-blower act”, because she believed the SAA board was wasting public resources at a time when the unprofitable parastatal was supposed to be saving money.
She is also now taking her suspension to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration.
The affidavit details the sequence of events in the appointment of the little-known BnP Capital, which stood to make R256.5 million, including VAT, from a deal to raise R15 billion for SAA earlier this year.
Stimpel says BnP’s mandate was extended from transaction adviser – which would have earned it R2.6 million – to sourcing funding on April 21 this year. Yet, the board only signed authorisation more than a month later, on May 25.
While BnP claimed its services would save the company R300 million – when National Treasury wanted R400 million saved – most of the purported BnP
savings would have been wiped off by the success fee of R256.5 million, she said.
SAA has admitted it shortened its procurement procedures in the case of BnP because it had to raise the R15 billion in two months after a deal arranged with the Free State Development Corporation for the full debt collapsed at the last minute.
Stimpel denies this in her affidavit, citing a May 25 letter from Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan to SAA chairperson Dudu Myeni in which he said the Free State Development Corporation deal could not go ahead because there were procedural flaws.
In the same letter, the minister authorised Myeni to refinance or roll over the debt maturing in June and July this year, thereby taking away the need for emergency funding.
She also said the process of securing the R15 billion had started in June last year.
“Thus, it is evident that there was no need for urgency,” she said.
“In addition, on May 25 this year, the minister of finance gave an instruction to SAA to roll over the debt maturing in June and July this year into longer-term debt.”
SAA says it cancelled the deal after it discovering that the Financial Services Board had revoked BnP’s licence.
Stimpel argues the airline only acted after she had disclosed the information to the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse, the Public Protector and National Treasury.
She said she decided not to use the airline’s internal whistle-blowing mechanisms on advice from colleagues, including Thuli Mpshe, the then human resources general manager, who has since been suspended, and an executive committee member she identified only as “Du Plessis”.
Also, she believed the internal hearing wasn’t effective as she was convinced the authorities would simply sit on the information until it was too late to reverse the contract.
SAA’s 2015 financial results are still to be released, having already been postponed four times in the past year.
They are now expected to be released on September 15.
