This as the Special Tribunal on Monday declared that the R 39 million surgical gown tender was unlawful and should therefore be set aside.

The tender was awarded to 32 service providers overall – of which only three supplied the surgical gowns as per tender specifications.

Whilst the R 32 million was set aside for the procurement of the surgical gowns overall, the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) says in a statement that at present R 9,5 million has been paid to several of the service providers.

It isn’t just the government officials that are bearing the financial implications of the scandal, but the service providers as well. The tribunal has ordered that the service providers be divested of the profits they have derived or stand to derive from the tender, as well as cover legal costs associated with the hearing.

In November 2021 OFM News reported that so far the SIU has managed to recover only 1,8% of the funds paid out by government to North West service providers who inflated the prices of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to a written response by the Minister of Justice and Correctional Services, Ronald Lamola, on the Parliament Monitoring Group (PMG) to the Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) Haseenabanu Ismail on the matter, it is revealed only R 19 591 of the over R 1 million that was inflated by the service providers in their PPE quotations to the provincial government and later paid out has been recovered. The outstanding funds are being deemed as debt owed to the North West government by the embattled service providers.

This means that over R 1 million still needs to be recovered at present pertaining to the inflated PPE prices. Overall, the SIU has probed Covid-19 tenders worth R 15 million involving 21 service providers in the North West. At this stage, only one government official has had internal disciplinary proceedings instituted against him/her, whereas seven service providers are under investigation by police for charging Value Added Tax (VAT) when they were not registered VAT vendors. Lamola says the investigation was meant to have been concluded at the end of October 2021.

OFM News