While the Office of the Chief Justice (OCJ) will on Tuesday turn to the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria for the self-review of a tender awarded by its office relating to procurement irregularities in the CaseLine project, three senior OCJ officials who had meanwhile resigned asked to intervene in the application.
The matter involved the award of a departmental tender to a company – Thomson Reuters (Professional) UK Ltd (TR) – which had subcontracted to a local company whose shareholders were the three senior OCJ officials.
The court online system – where all matters before court are filed electronically – is currently in use in Gauteng and it is due to be rolled out to other provinces.
A procurement process was initiated during 2021 for the evidence management part of the court online system. Following a sole source procurement process, the OCJ awarded a contract to Thomson Reuters to provide software, licences, resources, and support and maintenance for a period of 60 months, commencing in April 2022.
The OCJ later noted that the three directors involved in the tender were its employees. By then, the three directors had already served their resignation letters to the OCJ and were serving their notice period.
Their subcontract between their company ZA Square Consulting and TR has meanwhile been cancelled.
The OCJ initiated an application for self-review of the tender awarded to TR. The OCJ, through its then Secretary General, also filed an affidavit in which certain allegations and concerns about the role of the now three former employees – Nicolaas Coetzer, Nkosikhona Mncube, and Yvonne van Niekerk – were raised.
The three now asked to be joined in this week’s application. They do not oppose the setting aside of the main tender, but they say there are allegations being made in the OCJ’s court papers regarding them stemming from the time when they still worked for this office.
They maintained that these allegations are defamatory of them and done purely to bring them into disrepute and to harm their future commercial prospects. Thus, they argued, they should be part of the main application so that they could defend themselves.
Judge Anthony Millar, however, said to his mind, the main review proceedings will be decided based on the record of the proceedings which are under review.
“Their position is no different from any past employee of any institution whose conduct while employed is to be considered. The right to dignity is not in issue. Either the grounds of review premised on the conduct of the applicants have merit or they do not. The application to intervene lacks any merit and must be refused.”
But this is not the end of the matter, the judge said, as Coetzer in his affidavit called into question the honesty and integrity of the Secretary General of the OCJ, who had deposed to the affidavits on its behalf in the review proceedings. The OCJ called these allegations “scandalous and vexatious,” and Judge Millar chose not to repeat the allegations in his judgment.
In striking down these allegations from the court papers, the judge said: “Such allegations appear to have been made with the sole purpose of humiliating, demeaning, and bringing the former Secretary General into disrepute by suggesting that she was somehow involved with or abetted impropriety.”
He slapped the three officials with a punitive costs order against them.
