The tone for the country’s political week was set by the testimony of investigator Paul Holden to the commission on Monday, 24 May – an endless recital of figures with astounding amounts of zeros, millions and millions of taxpayers’ money laundered through the Gupta washing machines.
Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
AmaBhungane’s investigation shows how the Turkish-led consortium was tipped as a preferred bidder for an estimated R225-billion energy deal, and “was dealt an extraordinary series of aces during the tender process”.
These “trump cards”, amaBhungane reported in an article that appeared on their own website as well as on Daily Maverick and News24, demonstrated how the unlikely scenario emerged that had “permitted temporary leases of second-hand ships to qualify as ‘greenfield projects’ and magically meet a 40% local content threshold during ‘construction’ despite the fact they are foreign-built”.
After years of waiting, the successful bidders of the Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (RMI4P) were announced by Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe in March. But even non-participants in the energy sector were bewildered by how foreign-owned floating power stations had won the lion’s share