Two former employees of engineering firm Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) have been arrested, together with their wives, in connection with an allegedly inflated multimillion-rand contract for work at Eskom’s Kusile power station.
It is alleged that they received cash and cars from a company ABB sub-contracted, called Impulse International.
The Investigating Directorate (ID) arrested the four people as part of a multi-agency initiative involving the Hawks and SARS in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal and Middelburg in Mpumalanga, after raiding their premises.
They were expected to appear in the Durban Specialised Commercial Crimes Court and the Randburg Magistrates’ Court yesterday.
Fin24 previously reported that former acting Eskom CEO Matshela Koko was accused of promising ABB R6.5 billion in future contracts if it sub-contracted work on Kusile to Impulse International, a company partially owned by his stepdaughter, Koketso Choma.
ABB was reportedly awarded a R2.2 billion control and instrumentation contract for Kusile in 2015, and subcontracted some of the work to Impulse. This was despite the fact that Impulse twice failed ABB’s tests for sub-contractor appointments and did not qualify to do the work, according to the Sunday Times.
News24 previously reported that documents in the Eskom Files – a vast data dump of emails, forensic reports, bank statements and legal and financial records – show that ABB paid Impulse R557 million.
After Choma became a shareholder at Impulse, Eskom awarded the company a series of other lucrative contracts and paid the firm R295 million.
Eskom apparently stopped paying Impulse in 2017, after the Sunday Times exposed the links between the company, Koko and Choma.
Koko has consistently denied involvement in ABB’s awarding of sub-contracts to Impulse.