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Beleaguered Emalahleni municipal manager Theo van Vuuren is facing more criminal charges because he is allegedly hellbent on buying a new mayoral car using the service delivery budget.
Van Vuuren caused an outcry about three weeks ago when he proposed to council that he would take R1.5 million from budget rollovers from the previous financial year to buy the vehicle for Mayor Lindiwe Ntshalintshali.
Mpumalanga ANC secretary, Mandla Ndlovu, said the council had been told to put the plan on hold.
The community of the suburb of Tasbet Park staged a protest march against this planned purchase because they did not have water.
But it seemed that Van Vuuren was adamant to forge ahead with the plan.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has now laid fraud and corruption charges over the issue.
“According to evidence we have presented to the police [Van Vuuren] may be attempting to rollover unspent conditional grants from three years ago in order to harvest funds for a new R1.5 million vehicle for the executive mayor,” said DA councillor Naritha Naidu.
“In his attempts, Van Vuuren may have manipulated the vote numbers of capital budget allocations in order to mislead council and make it difficult for anyone to trace where the money was actually coming from.”
Naidu added that, due to Van Vuuren’s financial mismanagement, eMalahleni may not have been able to secure any grants or subsidies for the 2015-2016 financial year – which would lead to a virtual shutdown of service delivery in the municipality.
Van Vuuren said the municipality faced more important and challenging matters, such as land invasions and water shortages that commanded the municipality’s attention, than the DA’s “destructive approach”.
“It’s not clear to the municipal legal team and the chief financial officer what the specific problem is as all processes have been followed correctly and we are not aware of any issues,” he said.
“The DA, as members of council, should have raised their concern so that the chief financial officer could have addressed it. Actually this is the prescribed procedure. The municipality has always been, and will be under my leadership, willing to correct mistakes if pointed out,” Van Vuuren said.
He said he was unaware of any communication from the ANC about this matter. He said that no appointment regarding the specification committee or tender process had taken place.
In August, the DA laid fraud and corruption charges against Van Vuuren because he allegedly siphoned about R1 million from farm leases into a private account.
Documents show that money paid by commercial farmers to lease council farms was paid into an FNB account that does not belong to the municipality.
