Why South Africa’s National Gambling Board was suspended

There was other news coming out of South Africa this week besides the rather lenient sentencing of some bloke who killed his girlfriend last year.

More light has been shed on why members of South Africa’s National Gambling Board were suspended a month or so ago.

On 22 September a notice was posted on the NGB website reading:

“The Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr Rob Davies has temporarily removed the Board of the National Gambling Board (NGB) on the 09 September 2014 pending a forensic investigation.”

No further explanation was given at the time by Rob Davies, but you just knew it was going to be a good one when it came. Well on Friday last week it arrived, in part at least, in the form of a written submission to the Parliament’s trade and industry portfolio committee outlining reasons for the suspension.

Members of the board have been very naughty over the past year or so. Probably so focused on delivering on their mission of uniformity, harmonisation and integrity of the gambling industry that they overlooked applying any integrity to themselves?

Here are some of the allegations in Dr Davies submission.

 “failing to prevent irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, and making overdraft on the entity’s bank account without the approval of the minister of finance”

Included in this wasteful expenditure was R2.7 million spent on travel during 2013/14 including a junket to Norway that cost R1.4 million. They also gave themselves pay rises for the year amounting to a 46% increase on the previous year.

There was also:

“allowing members whose term of office had expired to continue participating in the board’s activities and representing the NGB” 

and

“apparent corrupt activities regarding the National Central Electronic Monitoring System”

as well as some

“intimidation/bullying/disregard of constitution/witch-hunt and theft of evidential material”

They had a very busy year by the sounds of things. Perhaps the pay rise was in order?

MP Dean Macpherson has said that his Democratic Alliance party would move to have  criminal charges brought against any board member found to have acted illegally.

Seems a fair chance of that.