Eskom lays a charge against the Democratic Alliance

21 January 2016

Eskom has this morning (Thursday) laid a criminal charge at the Sandton Police Station against the Democratic Alliance (DA) for contravening the Regulation of Gatherings Act 205 of 1993. DA members, Mazzone et al arrived at Eskom’s Head Office on Wednesday, 20 January 2016 without prior approval and proceeded to occupy the reception area in a rowdy manner demanding to see Eskom Group Chief Executive, Mr Brian Molefe.

Eskom’s mandate is powering South Africa and all its employees are committed to discharge their duties.  We have not implemented load shedding for close to five months and we continue to do maintenance on our plant to ensure long-term sustainability. It is therefore disturbing to note that a political party could act in a manner that seeks to disturb and derail the focus of a company from doing its core business by keeping it busy with nonsensical petitioning.

Eskom has appeared in Parliament where Ms Mazzone sat 91 times between April 2012 and November 2015. Additionally, we have dealt with hundreds of parliamentary questions of which 11 dealt with the issue of remuneration in the past three years. Her disturbance yesterday was unnecessary and smacks cheap politicking antics. 

Eskom will be laying another charge of fraud later this afternoon following a brief investigation that revealed that the information of some of the signatories of the ‘petition’ is not authentic.

Upon inspection of the petitions, it was most alarming to note that some signatures appear to have been executed by the same person and the petitioners somehow managed to sign the petition on one page in first name alphabetical order.  Identity numbers of the signatories are either incomplete or nonsensical (e.g. 780567…, 870431…,723652…) and at least one cell phone number proved to be call centre number of the Financial Services Board.

Issued by Eskom, 21 January 2016