FULL TEXT: Ousted Sascoc trio go on the offensive

The drama at Sascoc continued after the fired trio of senior employees wrote an open letter to stakeholders and media on Friday night.

In essence, they contend that their findings of their disciplinary hearings are not credible and provide various reasons for it.

Here is the full transcript of the letter:

We write this letter to you the sports leadership in South Africa in the hope that you do not sit back any longer and believe the lies that some of the SASCOC board are feeding you.

We are aware that you have received the findings of the Chair of the one-sided hearing, therefore we believe there is no credibility in the findings.

Let us provide you with some food for thought. As they say YOU BE THE JUDGE

1.Contrary to Barry Hendricks contention that Norton Rose Fulbright was paid R3 million, it has reliably been established that Norton Rose Fulbright fees paid to date is R6.2 million. Interestingly SASCOC recently received a grant of R10 million from the IOC. It is therefore evident that money intended for athlete development and participation is being squandered in particular by Gideon Sam, Barry Hendricks and Kobus Marais as they do not have a mandate from the full board on the actions that they have taken.

2. Gauteng Sports Confederation was recently paid R857 500 while no other provincial sports confederation was paid any money during this period. Is there perhaps some conflict of interest given the fact that Barry Hendricks is the President of Gauteng Sports Confederation?

3. For the first time SASCOC has not produced an audited financial statement timeously in 2017 under the leadership of this new board. It must be noted that the audited financial statements were in fact completed timeously by the CFO but before the auditors could sign off the CFO was suspended which resulted in the auditors not signing off.

4. For the first time SASCOC have not held its Annual General Meeting 2017 under the leadership of this new board. Amongst the many violations of the constitution by the board this is a further example of violation as the constitution clearly states that SASCOC will host an Annual General Meeting as part of good governance.

5. This is the same President that denied Ms Kelly on racial grounds to be the Chef de Mission of Team South Africa to the Rio Games 2016 as she is “from the white race”. This decision the President tabled in a full board meeting and not a single board member on the board at that time saw fit to challenge or object to such a racist decision. Ironically including the three white board members.

6. Desiree Vardhans sexual harassment charges against me referred to 2009/10/11. Strangely enough the allegations were only made in 2017. Sexual harassment is in fact a total fabrication and vindictiveness on her part after her husband Size Vardhan was stopped by me from earning money from SASCOC in a clandestine manner. Mrs. Vardhan was able to convince her good friend Ms Rohini Naidoo (HOD KZN Sports Department) to inject funds into SASCOC for coaching programs, a good thing indeed. However, I later discovered it was an avenue to ensure that her husband continued to earn large amounts of money as the facilitator of the clinics. One example is a course run at Durban University of Technology(DUT) to the tune of R1.7 million where he was the Chief Facilitator. Incidentally the CV of Mr. Vardhan references contain amongst others Gideon Sam and Jerry Segwaba who happens to be the Chair of the Coaches Commission, how coincidental? For a woman that claimed I sexually harassed her I would like you to look at the SMS exchange between her and myself in 2016 which clearly shows you that this does not sound like a woman being sexually harassed. Amazingly the learned senior counsel who chaired the hearing did not consider this at all. They have very cleverly interspersed the sexual harassment charges with other charges in a deliberate attempt to cast me and my character in a bad light. 

7. Have you ever asked yourselves why we eventually lost the rights to host the Durban 2022 Commonwealth Games? Without discussing the issue of the youth legacy program with our stakeholders in government Gideon Sam setup a partnership with a company for what they called Nation of Champions where SASCOC would be a 50% shareholder. This project would have generated huge amounts of money in the run up to delivering Durban 2022. Gideon Sam was the Chairman of the company, his daughter was one of the Directors of the company and his SASCOC PA was designated as the General Manager of the company. This angered government and thereafter they wanted total control to deliver the Games which the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) would not allow, it was not just about affordability.

There is plenty more that we can say but we will stop at this stage and make our full submission to the Ministers Commission of Enquiry which the SASCOC leadership is trying so hard to discredit and is in fact threatening to interdict the Minister. That is why they had to hastily conclude the disciplinary hearing without giving us a fair hearing so that we could be discredited before we get to the Commission of Enquiry.
Finally in this long drawn out battle how much more athletes funds will be spent on Norton Rose Fulbright.

Only you can put a stop to this madness.

Regards,
Tubby Reddy, Vinesh Maharaj and Jean Kelly

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