RAF CEO launches astonishing tirade against law firm and university professor

Road Accident Fund (RAF) CEO Collins Letsoalo has launched a blistering attack on a firm of attorneys and an emeritus professor in the Department of Private Law at the University of Pretoria for being part of a campaign to “capture” the fund.

Letsoalo on Thursday singled out Gert Nel of Gert Nel Attorneys Inc, which only handles RAF claims for road accident victims, and Professor Hennie Klopper, who is also a legal practitioner at HB Klopper Attorney in Pretoria, during a media conference.

He referred to Nel as an “imposter” and claimed Nel’s attacks on the RAF have reached a crescendo over the past two weeks when he published an “open letter” that was followed by a media blitz on a radio station and “self-serving articles disguised as news in two newspapers”.

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‘Soliloquies and prophesy’

“In all his soliloquies, in which he never misses an opportunity to warn about an impending ‘crash of the Road Accident Fund’, the common thread is the shameless lies he spews about the RAF.

“In the doomsday scenario that Nel prophesises, the RAF ‘struggles with severe operational and financial crises’, which he blames on the current [RAF] board and executive management,” Letsoalo said.

He claimed Nel is against the transformation initiatives of the RAF and its turnaround strategy.

He said Gert Nel Attorneys Inc has from 2019 to 2024 been paid over R2.2 billion in claims.

“Put simply, Nel has become very rich milking the RAF. Any change in the RAF status disrupts the gravy train that benefits him and his colleagues.

“The most offending part of this transformation to Nel is the RAF Amendment Bill, which seeks … to remove the participation of attorneys in the claims process.

“If this is achieved, which we as the RAF are determined to do, it would wipe away Nel’s cash cow and primary source of income.

“That is one of the primary reasons why Nel is engaged in a determined and unending war against the fund,” said Letsoalo.

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“He is protecting his pocket and those of his colleagues. He wants an untransformed and structurally dysfunctional RAF, which is good for him as it lines his pocket and those of his colleagues.”

Letsoalo added that Nel wants the management of the RAF that “is disrupting his gravy train” to be booted out “so that his feeding trough must remain unmolested” to allow him to continue to “cash in”.

He said Nel set about “trying to disguise the greed that characterises many personal injury lawyers and to mask his exploitation of the claimants he represents” and is a founding member of the Association for the Protection of Road Accident Victims, an organisation founded by attorneys to protect their interests as well as those of their colleagues.

“They do this while pretending to empower and defend road accident victims,” he said.

Letsoalo said the RAF is not facing collapse, although he admitted “this probably [was] a possibility before, [but] it is certainly not as we speak”.

He said the RAF is also on record as repeatedly pronouncing that the current legislation has led to structural deficiencies at the fund and this is unsustainable and needs to change.

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Nel’s response

Nel told Moneyweb on Thursday he is “definitely” considering instituting a claim against Letsoalo for defamation.

“Many of the things that Mr Letsoalo said are without any facts or merit and it is definitely something that I will address.

“There are a lot of things that he said that aren’t true and [are] simply a lie,” he said.

Nel denied that he had launched a campaign against the RAF but admitted highlighting and calling out the mistakes and measures the fund has implemented to either manipulate the figures and limit the access of road accident victims to the RAF.

“Everything that they [RAF] have implemented as a turnaround strategy has been found in court to be illegal, so it’s not a campaign,” he said.

Nel said foreigners are covered in terms of the RAF Act and all the victims that are not being paid have valid court orders that the RAF must pay them.

Despite this, the RAF is not paying the claims of these foreigners nor the past medical expenses of claimants who belong to a medical scheme, he said.

“What we find as practitioners is that the RAF is essentially trying to amend the act through litigation.

“There are more than 14 judgments in different courts in the country ordering the RAF to pay victims that have medical aids, which they are not doing,” he said.

“Collins [Letsoalo] … is being called out on all of these things and wants to come up with all sorts of allegations about my firm and the way that we are conducting ourselves.

“We have been investigated by his special investigating unit but nothing [irregular] was found.

“He is trying to get out of a corner by deflecting the attention from himself and his board to somebody like me that is exposing the truth,” he said.

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Klopper’s criticisms

Letsoalo said Klopper “has been furiously writing critical articles” about the RAF, one of which calls for urgent reform to “restore [the] RAF’s purpose and rebuild public trust”, which suggested there was some purpose and public trust that has since been lost.

He said Klopper’s latest article in the professional journal De Rebus is critical of the RAF’s accounting policy without explaining the background of this change.

The Auditor-General issued a disclaimer to the RAF’s 2020/2021 annual financial results because the fund had unilaterally adopted a different accounting standard, resulting in the fund’s liabilities for outstanding claims plummeting to R34 billion in 2022/23 from R331 billion in 2019/20.

To date, three court judgments have been issued against the RAF related to this accounting standard.

Deputy Minister of Transport Mkhuleko Hlengwa, immediate past chair of parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa), told the committee in October 2024 it remains the position of the Transport Ministry that it will be “reckless and irresponsible and not in the collective interests of the RAF” for it to continue on its path of court appeals against the AG.

Letsoalo said on Thursday the RAF’s audited performance as reported in the published 2023/24 annual report clearly indicates that the turnaround strategy averted a certain collapse of the fund and showed that the short-term claims liability or amount requested but not yet paid (RNYP) was reduced to R9.7 billion instead of the projected R53 billion.

He emphasised this reduction has got nothing to do with the accounting policy change and is not in dispute with the AG.

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Letsoalo said the RAF’s legal costs have been significantly reduced, resulting in the fund cumulatively saving over R20 billion in legal costs in the four years of implementing the turnaround strategy.

He questioned why Kloppers “and his lobby group” are so opposed to a defined benefit scheme for the RAF and indicated it is “equally shocking” that they “are even opposed to the proposal to exclude foreigners from benefiting from the RAF scheme”.

Letsoalo further claimed it seems that Klopper and “his group are intent on peddling propaganda in the hope that they recapture the RAF”.

A Department of Transport regulation and RAF management directive that attempted to exclude foreigners who are illegally in South Africa from submitting claims against the RAF was declared invalid by the High Court in Pretoria in March this year and an application for leave to appeal that judgment was dismissed with costs in July.

The RAF has also faced legal challenges to its decision not to pay the past medical expenses of fund claimants who are members of a medical scheme.

This article was republished from Moneyweb. Read the original here.