SAA and Outa closer to courtroom showdown over dodgy BnP Capital deal

© Peter Titmuss – 123RF.com

Ivan Herselman, the legal director of Outa, said on Tuesday that the response from SAA to Outa’s letter was "not good enough".

Earlier this month Outa detailed as many as 19 contraventions of SAA’s own supply chain management policy and breaches of a number of acts such as Public Finance Management Act, the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act as well as the Constitution.

"They have said they are in discussions with BnP and (SAA) only agreed to suspend payments to BnP until the end of the month. That is not what we asked for," he said.

"We will be writing to them to insist that they give us an undertaking not to pay them at all…. We don’t want to be in a situation where on August 1 they pay them and then we have to go to court and try to undo something that has been concluded," he said.

It is increasingly likely that the legal fight for which Outa has been preparing will unfold soon.

BnP was hired to give financial advice to SAA on its dire debt position. It is alleged BnP then alerted SAA to how dire its financial crisis was and that large loan payments were due for which the airline did not have money.

SAA then extended BnP’s contract to include raising debt, as much as R7.3bn, in order to keep the airline afloat, it said.

However, this version of events has been met with scorn as the extent of the airline’s debt has long been known and the job could have been done by SAA’s own financial staff.

The transaction was opposed by SAA’s treasurer, Cynthia Stimpel, after she said BnP was charging as much as three times more than market rates, and that the work the board wanted done could be done internally.

Stimpel has since been suspended, and joins a long list of experienced SAA senior staff who have been removed from the airline for opposing the directions from the board.

The airline has no permanent CEO, chief financial officer, chief commercial officer, head of strategy or head of human resources, and almost 80% of the senior staff in the airline’s commercial division have resigned or been suspended.