{"id":2272,"date":"2010-12-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/amabhungane\/stories\/khulubuse-zuma-tries-to-pay-workers-secretly\/"},"modified":"2010-12-17T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-17T00:00:00","slug":"khulubuse-zuma-tries-to-pay-workers-secretly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/khulubuse-zuma-tries-to-pay-workers-secretly\/","title":{"rendered":"Khulubuse Zuma tries to pay workers secretly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Khulubuse Zuma, the chief executive of embattled mining company Aurora Empowerment Systems, allegedly tried to make a “covert” payment of R5-million to a union representative to pay the Aurora workers’ unpaid salaries.<\/p>\n

According to Solidarity’s Gideon du Plessis, Zuma called him two weeks ago to arrange to meet him “alone” at a Sandton Hotel.<\/p>\n

Du Plessis was first contacted by Thulani Ngubane, Aurora’s financial director, to set up a meeting.<\/p>\n

Ngubane asked Du Plessis to come on his own because they wanted the encounter to be “between the leaders”.<\/p>\n

He was told that he could not bring National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) representatives to the meeting, to which he replied that he would not attend.<\/p>\n

“Then Khulubuse phoned me,” said Du Plessis.<\/p>\n

“He was very angry. He said, ‘How dare you?’ He asked me how much was owed [in outstanding salaries] and I said between R5- million and R12-million. So he said he had R5-million in his own pocket and that I must distribute it to all the workers.”<\/p>\n

When Du Plessis refused to accept the money, Zuma paid it over to liquidator Enver Motala from his personal bank account.<\/p>\n

Motala said he then paid about R2-million to the Department of Labour, as decided on in a departmental audit.<\/p>\n

The R3-million balance was in a trust and the department had yet to undertake a second audit to determine exactly how much of it would be paid to Aurora workers.<\/p>\n

According to Sekhotali Lorotholi, spokesperson for the provincial department of labour, the department began paying about 1 500 workers at Aurora’s Grootvlei operation on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

These are workers who earn less than R12 000 a month.<\/p>\n

She said that the money came directly from Aurora and not through Motala.<\/p>\n

“This is a slap in the face,” said Lesiba Seshoka, spokesperson for the NUM.<\/p>\n

“We estimate that Aurora owes about R15-million. That R2-million will be too little to pay these workers their salaries and for the deductions for the provident fund.”<\/p>\n

Other deductions include union subscription fees and garnishee orders, as well as UIF deductions that were never paid to the fund.<\/p>\n

On Thursday Seshoka issued a scathing press release, pleading with Aurora to pay the workers.<\/p>\n

“We are very worried that we hear that over R70 000 was spent on liquor … That pictures of expensive cars are splashed all over the newspapers . That you go fishing from pillar to post for oil deals,” reads the statement.<\/p>\n

Du Plessis said Zuma’s offer to pay him the money was “very odd”.<\/p>\n

“I thought it’s not very noble because that money has come out of the mine,” he said.<\/p>\n

“It’s also to buy time. They know if we go to court we’ll close the business down.”<\/p>\n

Solidarity plans to represent more than 500 workers in a court challenge to Aurora at the beginning of next year to claim all the outstanding payments to workers since March.<\/p>\n

Aurora has faced continual problems with the liquidated Pamodzi mines since it took control in October last year.<\/p>\n

Aurora’s board boasts Zuma, nephew of President Jacob Zuma, Zuma’s lawyer, Michael Hulley, and Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Zondwa Mandela.<\/p>\n

The company was given an extension until this week to come up with R600-million required to purchase the mines.<\/p>\n

But it is understood that it will request a further extension until February 28.<\/p>\n

Motala told the Mail & Guardian<\/em> in October that a state-owned Chinese mining company was interested in purchasing 60% of Aurora.<\/p>\n

“The Chinese were here,” said Motala. “We had a very lucrative meeting with them. We’re hoping the guarantees will be issued by Friday.”<\/p>\n

But Du Plessis was unimpressed. “It’s the same old story; this will be the fifth extension they’ve asked for,” he said.<\/p>\n

“And even if the Chinese do come up with the R600-million, they will still need R300-million to restore the infrastructure. They also owe the creditors R200-million and they owe the workers.”<\/p>\n

Khulubuse Zuma could not be reached for comment by the time of going to press.<\/p>\n

href=”http:\/\/www.amabhungane.co.za”=”_blank”><\/p>\n

This article was produced by amaBhungane, investigators of the M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit initiative to enhance capacity for investigative journalism in the public interest. www.amabhungane.co.za<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CEO of embattled mining company Aurora Empowerment Systems, allegedly tried to pay a union representative R5-million for unpaid workers’ salaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}