MEDIA STATEMENT BY FREEDOM UNDER LAW

Last Thursday Freedom Under Law lodged papers with the Constitutional Court asking it to intervene once again in the ongoing saga of the illegal social grants contract between Cash Paymaster Services and SASSA. This time it relates to the Court’s order that CPS’s audited profits from the contract be verified by SASSA and approved by Treasury.  

FUL maintains that there has not been proper compliance with the order. SASSA’s independent auditors were denied full access to CPS’s financial records, but nonetheless concluded that CPS may have underreported its profits by more than R800 million, and Treasury did not give its approval. The absence of an open, independently verified and authoritatively approved audit frustrates the ultimate purpose of the Court’s orders, which was to secure CPS’s repayment of the profit it made under the unlawful contract and its extensions.

This state of affairs, says FUL CEO Nicole Fritz, is unacceptable. “The possible recovery of more than a billion Rand from CPS is important to ensure that there is no perpetuation of the unlawfulness of the social grants contract. But it becomes even more important in light of the current threats we face and the pronounced risk this presents for so many dependent on social grants.”