Controversial former SAA board member Yakhe Kwinana will appear in court soon for her conduct during her tenure at the crisis-hit airline.
A well-placed source with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed this week that the Hawks serious crime offences unit has been engaging with Kwinana, and had secured a warning statement from her in the past two months on her time as a board member of the airline.
Yesterday, Hawks spokesperson Col Katlego Mogale said "a warrant of arrest has been issued for a member of the board of a public entity". She declined to give further details.
The Sunday Times understands that Kwinana will be charged with contravening the Public Finance Management Act in that she failed to disclose to SAA’s board that her audit firm, Kwinana and Associates, had previously done work with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Nkonki Incorporated.
At the time a joint venture of the two firms was being appointed by the state-owned airline to a four-year, multimillion-rand auditing contract, and Kwinana was chair of the SAA board’s audit and risk subcommittee.
The source said investigations were at such an advanced stage that Kwinana would soon find herself in the dock.
“There has been an agreement that she will not be arrested but will hand herself over at a police station and be transported to court where she will be informed of her charges and be able to apply for bail,” said the insider.
The Hawks did not respond to a request for confirmation of the investigation, while the NPA could not be reached for comment.
The investigation follows findings by former chief justice Raymond Zondo in his commission’s report on allegations of state capture. SAA and the aviation sector was investigated by Zondo and Kwinana spent a couple of days being grilled on her involvement — alongside former board chair Dudu Myeni — in several incidents at the airline.
Zondo accused Kwinana and Myeni, who died in June, of causing “sustained damage to our national airline”, and said their management style “enabled acts of fraud and corruption to engulf the [airline’s] entities”.
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Zondo recommended that Kwinana be investigated for corruption after she was found to have received R4.7m from an SAA Technical service provider. At the time she was chair of the SAA subsidiary’s board. The chartered accountant was also stripped of her licence to practise and fined R6.7m by the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants in 2023 after being found guilty of 12 of the 13 charges brought against her by the institute.
This case relates to Kwinana’s failure to disclose her conflict of interest when the SAA board appointed the PwC/Nkonki joint venture under a controversial award for services in 2011.
The Treasury found the contract to be irregular after the auditor-general found no contract was concluded between the airline and the parties. Evidence leader Kate Hofmeyr revealed at the commission that SAA had accumulated irregular expenditure of about R70m, including extensions, related to the contract.
Kwinana told the commission that R300,000 paid to her firm by Nkonki was meant to be a donation to the Jacob Zuma Foundation, and that she had been asked to hold on to it by a grouping of black auditors.
Kwinana did not respond to a request for comment this week.
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