DA questions appointment of new CEO of Regulatory Board of Auditors

24 May 2020

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has written to Tito Mboweni, the Minister of Finance, to request details of the proposed appointment of Ms Jenitha John as the CEO of the Independent Regulatory Board for Auditors (IRBA).

There are significant questions about the process followed for the appointment of Ms Jenitha John as the CEO of the IRBA. Ms John sat on the Board of Tongaat Hulett and chaired their Audit and Compliance Committee for 12 years during which period massive accounting irregularities apparently took place.

She was also a past Chair of the Nampak audit committee where there were also very serious concerns of malfeasance. Ms John, not surprisingly left her very lucrative position at Firstrand at the time of the emerging Tongaat Hulett accounting malfeasance.

Ms John is also strangely not a qualified and registered auditor and yet she is to run an organisation that has the main purpose of regulating the conduct of registered auditors.

There is surely no good argument to appoint someone without suitable qualifications and whose professional career is seemingly mired in controversy, the very sort of controversy that the IRBA is mandated to prevent?

Given that Mr Bernard Agulhas, the current CEO of the IRBA, has by all accounts done an excellent job during his term as CEO it raises questions of why the IRBA Board would make a clearly controversial appointment of Ms Jenitha John as a replacement for Mr Agulhas?

The IRBA Board is clearly in a rush to appoint Ms John. In a clear push to ensure that the appointment cannot be overturned, the board has taken the very strange step of apparently bringing Ms John’s appointment forward to the 25th of May 2020 and Mr Agulhas has apparently been requested to leave at the end of May 2020.

If this proposed and rushed arrangement by the IRBA Board does go ahead it will mean a mere five-day handover of the accounting officer position of an organisation tasked with a critical oversight role in the ethical life of business in South Africa.

Issued by Alf Lees, DA Member of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, 24 May 2020