Read: Transnet probed by Scopa over irregular expenditure

Ok look, we don’t like harping on about money lost or misappropriated any more than you like reading about it, but jeez Louise! Seriously, how do you lose track of or misappropriate a chunk of money large enough to build, God knows how many houses or send scores of people to school, college, university… take your pick.

Anyway, parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa aka a cabinet minister’s worst f*cking nightmare) has taken yet another SOE to task for p*ssing away millions in taxes.

“In the 2016 financial year Transnet incurred R60.3million (R519.3million in FY15) in losses through criminal conduct and irregular expenditure of R20.6 million (R32.2m in FY15) as well as fruitless and wasteful expenditure of R3.9m (R23m in FY 15). Therefore total PFMA exposures dropped from R574.5m to R84.8m in the FY 16. R229.8m in expenditure was investigated in 2015-16 for potential irregular expenditure but was later found not to be irregular expenditure,” said to Viwe Tlaleane, Group Corporate and Public Affairs at Transnet.

“Fruitless and wasteful and irregular expenditure represented 0.05% of total expenditure, the lowest during the MDS period since 2011.”

Transnet’s CEO Siyabonga Gama told Scopa that action is being taken against people found to have screwed with public funds, but the way things are looking right now we’d bet MPs from the committee are inches away from hauling the whole board into parliament for a full inquisition. Yes, inquisition.

 “All of these are taken very seriously. We follow them up and make sure that we exhaust all different measures available to us in terms of the law,” Gama said.

SOEs, their boards and the ministers responsible for them are dropping like flies and it we don’t seem to be bucking the trend; what with PetroSA’s R15 billion loss in the 2016 financial year earning it the ire of Scopa most recently.

Read: Another parastatal, another minister and R15 billion lost. What’s going on at PetroSA?