Corruption alleged at GSSC

By Christelle du Toit, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 19 Sept 2007

The Democratic Alliance (DA), in Gauteng, has blamed the recent two-week system failure at the Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC) on corrupt activities.

Jack Bloom, DA MP in the Gauteng legislature, says: "Someone is covering their tracks."

Bloom was referring to an incident in August, when all the IT systems at the GSSC were down for two weeks due to, what was described at the time, a virus infecting the system.

He believes more sinister forces are to blame for the systems failure.

"There have been a number of fishy contracts and activities at the GSSC," says Bloom. "They [the GCCS] are also not known for hiring the most effective staff and I believe they are now reaping the consequences of this."

Previous allegations

In 2005, former GSSC CEO Mike Roussos was linked to alleged fraudulent activities at Awaken, a company that was awarded a R4.6 million GSSC contract.

He was also exposed as a 50% shareholder in Capstone 518, a company that traded as Infotech Solution Services and was awarded a R52 million contract to be the GSSC's sole application software services provider.

Roussos' alleged involvement in these decisions was strongly defended by former Gauteng MEC for finance Jabu Moleketi.

Moleketi's successor, Paul Mashatile, ended Roussos' contract, but had a shadow cast over his name this year when it was alleged a major IT company employed his daughter during the time it was awaiting a decision on two multimillion-rand tenders for the GSSC. The company, Business Connexion, subsequently won the tenders, which amounted to about R18 million in business.

In 2006, it was reported that the GSSC had cost government tens of millions of rands through salary payments to "ghost" employees. It was reported at the time that at least 18 GSSC employees were fraudulently drawing salaries for retired teachers, nurses and social workers.

Reinvestigating

GSSC spokesman Emmanuel Mdawu says if the DA believes there is a cover up at the GSSC, the organisation should be able to substantiate such a claim.

"Who is covering for who?" asks Mdawu.

He explains that, after the first forensic investigation into the crash was concluded and presented to the GSSC's CEO, it was decided to mandate a second investigation, which is under way.

"The CEO wanted to make sure that any action that is taken is based on hard facts," says Mdawu. He reiterates that should it be found there was malicious intent in crashing the system, it would be pursued through disciplinary action.