Key NLC legal files have gone missing, says Patel

National Lotteries Commission (NLC) legal files, including documents from litigation running into tens of millions of rands, have gone missing, according to Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Ebrahim Patel, who has oversight of the lottery.

An attempt to get this from the lawyers involved “has not proved successful,” Patel told parliament’s portfolio committee last week.

“We are on to something here, that we need to probe harder,” Patel told MPs.

Collaboration

He said there may well have been collaboration between old NLC management, including board members, with law firms to deprive society of “resources that the NLC should make available to poor communities and to undermine the efforts of the department to introduce good governance”.

Patel said: “The NLC used law-fare against the ministry … [it] used enormous quantities of public money, to fight oversight by this department over their affairs. So I am interested in getting to the bottom of the legal costs: which lawyers were used, what are the briefs that were given to them, were those briefs legitimate and were those expenditures properly authorised? Were those expenditures for a proper public purpose or were they in defence of corruption?” Patel said.

Quoting correspondence from February this year between himself and new NLC commissioner Jodi Scholtz, Patel said she had told him that the organisation was “experiencing challenges” in supplying the information he had requested.

Irregular service providers

When the NLC reported to the trade, industry and competition portfolio committee on its most recent financial results last week, Scholtz told MPs all the contracts with legal service providers were cancelled because they were irregular.

“This has compounded the difficulties and we have to look at other options in order to get this information,” she said.

The NLC’s legal costs skyrocketed under the previous executive and board, as the organisation used costly legal threats and litigation to silence critics and to ward off attempts by Patel to hold it to account.

-Raymond Joseph

This article originally appeared on GroundUp and was republished with permission. Read the original article here