AmaBhungane’s Susan Comrie explains how she pieced together information from interviews, tipoffs and 1 000 court documents in her investigation of two consulting contracts Eskom awarded to multinational firm Deloitte in 2016.

“We started looking at Deloitte in 2018, when we were investigating Nkonki Inc. the auditing firm which was covertly acquired by (Gupta-man) Salim Essa, and it was in that context that we came across the two Eskom consulting contracts,” Comrie said.

But with little evidence to go on, the investigation into the awarding of contracts to Deloitte had to be put aside — until October last year.

In an affidavit filed at the high court in Johannesburg, Eskom’s former chairman Jabu Mabuza provided more details how Deloitte secured the R207-million contracts — despite its prices being considerably higher than other bidders. 

Deloitte has not filed its response to Mabuza’s affidavit, but during an interview with amaBhungane, Deloitte Consulting managing director for Africa Thiru Pillay accused Eskom of trying to bully Deloitte into a settlement.

As we reported in our original story, Pillay said that over months of discussions Deloitte had refused to concede that it was “complicit with irregular procurement” or that there was “any undertone of corruption” in its dealings with Eskom.

*Listen to the interview below.