Africa-Press – Lesotho. A company fighting for a contract to manage Lesotho’s biggest pension fund paid bribes to win a similar contract in South Africa. Akani Retirement Fund Administrators, a South African company, has been fighting for the contract to manage Lesotho’s Public Officers’ Defined Contribution Pension Fund (PODPCF) since 2020.
The basis of its bid for the PODCPF contract was that it had a sterling track record in South Africa where it once managed the Chemical Industries National Provident Fund (CINPF) which has 21 000 members and is worth M7 billion.
The PODCPF has 35 000 members who are government employees and, like the CINPF, is worth M7 billion. But in a massive blow to its reputation, South Africa’s High Court last week ruled that Akani bribed the trustees of CINPF to topple a rival company and get the contract.
The victim of its corruption, the court ruled, was NBC Holdings, a major shareholder in NBC Lesotho Insurance Company Limited with which Akani is fighting for the PODCPF contract in Lesotho.
NBC had been the CINPF’s administrators for three decades when Akani instigated its termination and took over the contract. It is those allegations of corruption that were at the centre of the long-drawn battle between the companies.
The court ruled that in 2019 Akani paid three CINPF trustees to terminate NBC’s contract. It found that the trustees faked the deaths of three relatives to receive the bribes in the form of insurance claims paid through
Neighbour Funeral Scheme, a company with strong links to Akani. The payments were made to the trustees – Bonginhlanhla Dangazele, Reginald Sema and Ayanda Sithole – four months after NBC’s termination and a week after Akani’s appointment.
Dangazele was the CINPF’s principal while Sema was deputised by Sithole as the chairperson of the board of trustees. Akani and the three had vehemently insisted that the payments which happened on the same day in 2019 were insurance claims for relatives who had died around the same time.
The three took up the insurance policies with the Neighbour Funeral Scheme around the time they were aggressively pushing out the NBC from the CINPF contract. Their relatives too died around the same time and their insurance pay claims were paid on the same day.
The court ruled that it was a “remarkable coincidence” that the three had taken out the policies at the same time, their relatives had died around the same time and Neighbour Funeral Services paid their claims within four minutes of each other. Dangazele received M40 000 while Sema and Sithole got M25 000 each.
Justice Adams said there is no explanation why, out of funeral policy vendors, the three trustees signed up for policies with Neighbour Funeral Scheme on the same day, their relatives died around the same week and their claims were paid minutes apart. The judge said based on “irrefutable inferential reasoning, the true purpose of the payments to Dangazele, Sema and Sithole was a bribe”.
“The explanation for the receipt of substantial payments all on the same day, all from one funeral scheme vendor, which happens to be a company related to Akani, one week after the appointment of Akani, in which decision they were directly involved, implies a series of truly remarkable and unlikely coincidences,” the judge said.
He ruled that the termination of NBC’s contract should be reversed because it had been tainted by corruption and fraud. The court also ordered the CINPF to remove Dangazele, Sithole and Sema as trustees.
The judgement in South Africa has serious implications in Lesotho because Akani and NBC are battling for the contract to manage the PODCPF. The fight started after the PODCPF renewed the NBC’s contract as an administrator following a two-horse race with Akani.
Four of the PODCPF’s trustees, who preferred Akani disputed the decision, wrote to Prime Minister Moeketsi Majoro, who was finance minister at that time, asking him to intervene to reverse NBC’s appointment.
They accused the board, of which they were members, of ignoring complaints against NBC in Lesotho and South Africa. They pointed out that NBC’s contract with CINPF has been terminated for “non-performance issues”.
They were referring to the same termination that the South African court has now ordered be set aside after finding that it was instigated by Akani through bribes to CINPF trustees.
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