Court shows no mercy for municipality’s continued failure to settle Eskom account

Eskom today (Monday 7 November)  confirmed that the power supplier did receive a payment of R10 million from the Ngwathe Municipality. The power supplier  also confirmed that the two parties are negotiating on a payment plan.
This follows after Eskom earlier said that for the months of July, August and September, no payment had been received from Ngwathe. The outstanding accounts for these months were R27 million, R44 million and R29 million respectively. By the end of September Ngwathe’s Eskom debt amounted to R1, 630,722,771,95. The September bill of R29 169 961,69 was due on 27 October.

But Eskom also in a statement today revealed that it has obtained a judgement of R1.3 billion against the Emfuleni Local Municipality for continued failure to settle its current account and accumulated arrears. The order was granted by the Pretoria High Court in October 2022 allowing Eskom to proceed with the execution of the judgement.
Eskom has now started with the execution steps against Emfuleni to recover some of the municipal debt, including attaching the local authority’s bank accounts and moveable assets.
The Emfuleni Municipality is currently indebted to Eskom to the amount of R5,3 billion despite several litigations brought by the power utility since March 2018 to get the municipality to service its account.
“Despite the municipality’s healthy revenue collection rate of about 90% from its customers, the local government still failed to pay a portion of its overdue account”, Eskom said.
Eskom has also served Emfuleni with further summons of R3,4 billion for non-payment of its bulk electricity supply and to date, the local authority has failed to file a plea setting out the reasons for non-payment. This resulted in Eskom and the municipality customers applying to court to transfer the muncipality’s electrictity distribution licence or part thereof to Eskom.
This application is to be heard in March 2023, and would set a presedence for municipalities failing to pay their Eskom debt and complying with the Electricity Supply Agreements (ESA).

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