FIDELITY Services Group has confirmed that it was awarded a security tender for three months with Eskom, but denies that it is worth R500 million.
This was after the group’s CEO, Wahl Bartmann, said Fidelity was awarded a contract to provide a comprehensive security solution consisting of a national deployment to cover generation and transmission.
However, Bartmann said the contract came at a total value of about R250m for the duration of the contract.
He said the group was already supplying other services to Eskom in support of the utility’s national wage dispute with other service providers during that time. He said the group was also not requested to provide any intelligence services to Eskom.
Bartmann's defence came after Eskom’s head of security, Karen Pillay, was suspended two weeks ago. This was after allegations that Pillay engaged in activities to sabotage power stations and embezzled about R500m in security tenders.
This came in the wake of leaked WhatsApp messages connecting Pillay to sabotage incidents at power stations, which caused damage to critical infrastructure and worsened the energy crisis in the country.
It has also been revealed that Fidelity was awarded a R500m contract for a three-month period without a bidding process. Pillay allegedly played a central role in the agreement.
But according to Bartmann, the contract was awarded on the group’s experience in managing specialised services within the current National Critical Infrastructure Industry and its national footprint.
“Including both land and air support with helicopter and tactical drone surveillance capabilities, specialised armoured personnel carriers, tactical intervention units, access and crowd control. Fidelity’s business centre, as well as national command centres, were utilised for operational compliance and execution,” Bartmann said.
“We will provide our full and unconditional co-operation to any inquiry that may be held as we are confident that all due processes were followed. All services and solutions were confirmed, vetted and approved with the client and the services provided met the compliance stipulations.”
Eskom refused to provide reasons why Pillay had been suspended, saying she was placed on precautionary suspension to allow space for the investigation of allegations levelled against her to continue unhindered. The state-owned power utility said no further comment would be made until the investigation is finalised.
In the meantime, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Highveld region and The Association of Private Security Owners of SA (Tapsosa) called for more senior officials, including Eskom’s former chief executive Andre de Ruyter and former board member Busiswe Mavuso, to also be investigated and arrested for their role in the matter.
NUM’s regional chairperson, Malekutu Motubatse, said the union strongly believes that there was unfairness displayed in the whole process and called for law enforcement to investigate and prosecute “all the greedy looters”.
“We are calling for such investigations to be extended to former chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer as we believe that there was no need for Eskom to pay such an amount of money,” Motubatse said.
He further said: “This is a serious security concern and our conviction is that we have competent law enforcement agencies that have the capacity and capabilities to deal with it. The former CEO De Ruyter just created a crisis so that he can greedily loot the power utility.”
Motubatse said the union believed that if that amount of money was looted by a black manager, the “proponents of anti-corruption” could have made a cacophony.
He said De Ruyter should be arrested, adding that he left the country not because his life was under threat, but because he was on honeymoon enjoying the R500m.
These sentiments were echoed by Tapsosa, who said the senior officials who signed off the tender must also face the music.
Association spokesperson Sindiswa Changuion said De Ruyter must be brought back to the country to account for his involvement in the saga. Changuion said the decision to hand a multimillion-rand deal to Fidelity was informed by a dodgy intelligence report.
She said the report was sanctioned and funded by various organisations including Business Leadership SA (BLSA), whose chief executive Busisiwe Mavuso was an active Eskom board member at that time.
“We also call for Mavuso to be investigated for her involvement in helping fund an intelligence-gathering institute that seems to have fabricated the findings to justify the awarding of an emergency security contract,” Changuion said.
Efforts to contact De Ruyter for comment were unsuccessful.
BLSA spokesperson Tumelo Muteme said the organisation briefed the media regarding the intelligence report in May. In a statement released after the briefing, Mavuso said the attack on De Ruyter and the risk assessment that BLSA part funded must be seen in terms of who stands to benefit.
“There are powerful actors, with strong motives both to stay out of jail and to maintain their access to resources who can push narratives to serve their interests. These vested interests are motivated both to challenge the transition to renewables, even though it is clearly the best (ie, quickest and cheapest) way to resolve the energy crisis, but from which they do not have the means of extraction, and to extort and corrupt Eskom,” Muteme said.
Meanwhile, former Eskom chief executive Matshela Koko came out in defence of Pillay, saying the government, led by the ANC, was looking for a scapegoat ahead of the elections next year. Koko said these were works of intelligence operatives that had gone rogue.
“They are desperately looking for a scapegoat for load shedding. If these fake messages are believed, then the ANC can be excused from load shedding. The blame would fall squarely on the shoulders of (Pillay),” Koko said.