City officials’ children allegedly handed large IT contracts
The DA said it would expand its criminal charges against Ekurhuleni’s former City Manager, Imogen Mashazi, following a report of alleged nepotism and corruption in the Sunday Times.
“We have already laid criminal charges against the former City Manager in Ekurhuleni due to other allegations of corruption and will continue to fight to purge corruption in the city,” the party said.
The report also implicated the metro’s suspended Chief Information Officer, Moloko Monyepao, in potential wrongdoing, which the DA said raised concerns about nepotism and conflicts of interest.
According to the report, a company that won two multimillion rand IT contracts employed Monyepao’s daughter and Mashazi’s son.
“The case forms part of wider allegations of irregular ICT contracts, questionable payments, and corruption within the municipality’s IT department,” the DA said.
“This is sadly only the beginning of the unravelling of a spider’s web of deceit, corruption, and impunity.”
At the start of June, the DA announced that it had laid criminal charges of corruption against Mashazi and her alleged bankroller, XET Solutions.
“In July 2022, Mashazi accepted a chartered flight to London worth millions of rands. She did not declare the trip,” the DA’s mayoral candidate for Ekurhuleni, Khathutshelo Rasilingwane, stated.
“From the allegations contained in the papers — it is now clear why: the money for the flight originated from a company called XET Solutions, which at the time had an active tender in place with the City.”
Rasilingwane said this was part of the billions of public funds that have been looted while service delivery collapses.
She said there was reason to be concerned that Mashazi violated supply chain management policies, key parts of the Municipal Systems Act, and the Prevention & Combating of Corrupt Activities Act.
“What we find highly suspicious, is that the company involved in this matter, XET Solutions, has won tenders from the City to work on vital infrastructure,” said Rasilingwane.
She said these tenders related to electronic bill payments and were therefore involved with the City’s billing system.
“In particular, the tender number A-ICT 02-2021 tasked XET Solutions with the support, maintenance, upgrade, expansion, and skills transfer of the enterprise resource planning solution used by the City.”
Rasilingwane explained the system was known as SOLAR, and was the exact system exploited by a criminal syndicate that siphoned R2 billion from the City.
“Shortly after Mashazi’s London trip, XET Solutions was awarded another tender, A-ICT 04-2023, to continue working on SOLAR.”
R1.19 billion missing
A delegation from Ekurhuleni told the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) in early May that a security breach that led to the manipulation of electricity accounts caused a revenue loss of R2 billion.
While some money was recovered, the metro said it suffered a “digital state of emergency” where R1.19 billion was yet to be recovered after hackers struck the municipality in a long-term cyberattack.
The city’s executive mayor, Nkosi Xhakaza, and the acting city manager told SCOPA that they discovered hackers had gained access to the city’s internal systems.
They said the attackers gained access through government facilities and then either removed debts or paid themselves by generating invoices.
Tsholofelo Koopedi, Ekurhuleni’s acting city manager, explained that rather than a year-long breach, the attack could have been a series of smaller breaches over time.
“You could drive to our licence station in Bedfordview, where we have Wi-Fi, and just park outside, and if you are a hacker, you can get access to our VPN and do these things,” he said.
The delegates said the city’s firewall had collapsed, which created an environment where the account-level manipulation could occur completely without detection, at first.
The city discovered that contractors were allegedly accessing the system to generate their own fake invoices and pay themselves.
“It did appear to ourselves that our security infrastructure was deliberately compromised in order to enable this fraudulent activity to take place,” said Koopedi.
Ekurhuleni delegates said they identified individuals who had previously been hired as consultants and were allegedly secretly working with outside influences to deliberately undermine the system.
In one instance, city officials discovered that ICT staffers implemented a loophole where cybersecurity was not monitored at night from 18:00 to 06:00, where manipulation was suspected to take place.
Jongizizwe Dlabathi, MMC for Finance, said there were whistleblowers within the city who reported that fraud was occurring on a massive scale.
He said that the city’s finance officials first noticed the problem when they analysed the city’s income against the budget. This began the investigation, which led to Monyepao’s suspension on 27 March 2025.
During the investigation, the city raided its own ICT department and seized around 35 computers for forensic analysis. The matter was reported to the police and the Special Investigating Unit (SIU).
Ekurhuleni said that the suspension stemmed from issues of its billing system, interim meter readings, account manipulations and poor management of business systems.
The investigation identified the compromised accounts and recovered a portion of the total losses, around R891 million, through a back-billing process.
It also implemented several system upgrades to restore integrity and prevent future breaches, bringing in the State Security Agency (SSA) for assistance.
Mashazi, Monyepao, and XET Solutions could not be reached for comment on the report or the DA’s statements regarding laying criminal charges.
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