Fort Hare lawyers paid R78m ‘without agreement’
Prosecutors believe Plaatjies, the university’s director of investigation and vetting unit, was instrumental in the looting scheme and facilitated payments from the university to a number of service providers who have since been arrested.
Speaking to Sowetan yesterday, Conradie said the money he paid to Plaatjies was a busiversity ness settlement for a deal he wanted to get into with Plaatjies after their meeting in August 2020.
“What people don’t know is that Isaac [Plaatjies] had no position and was on a monthto-month contract with the university with no budget.
“I wanted to get into business with him and then changed my mind. I had nothing to benefit from him. We did not need anyone to give us work.
“And the shocking bit is that the police never asked us anything about the payment which I knew was for Isaac’s house,” said Conradie.
On the payments he received from the university, Conradie said the amounts, which he is yet to get an audit for, were inflated by people inside the uniConradie’s and his company would normally get a fraction of what they agreed upon with the university.
“The investigators must have gone to the university and asked employees to type certain figures next to our names.
“We were making nominal amount from UFH because we had to hire some services from other people.
“We had to pay for flights and meals. We carried a lot of liability,” said Conradie.
He added that some of the money they received from the university was for long overdue invoices.
“Payments were often delayed for up to six months at a time. Even if you received a payment every month these payments were often for long overdue invoices.”
companies only signed the SLA in March, just less than two weeks before he and Burger were arrested in Cape Town.
In May 2022 the university’s CFO raised queries about companies that were being paid without SLAs and instructed the institution to refrain from doing so and said all work valued about R1m should go to tender or a deviation from that processes should be requested in advance.
However, both Horizon and BCHC managed to have their invoices paid despite this.
Conradie said there was no legal requirement to enter into an SLA as universities were not governed by the Municipal Finance Management Act and were not audited by the auditor-general.
“Also, police don’t understand how SLAs work,” he said.
Burger said they were only required to register in the institution’s database.
“In 2020 we pushed for an SLA because we realised that the university was a bad payer. We pushed to have it signed in 2022 and 2023.
“It was only signed in March this year when the university said they would not pay us until we signed.
“At the time we were already exiting the university,” said Burger.
The pair said by the time the SLA was signed, their relationship with Prof Buhlungu had soured because he felt that they were in support of Plaatjies.
“The VC [Buhlungu] painted Isaac [Plaatjies] as a person who can make things happen. He was a go-getter and able to network with people and we believed in him [Plaatjies]. We felt betrayed by him [Plaatjies],” said Conradie.
We were making nominal amount because we had to hire some services