MyJHB

Stuff from Johannesburg

Court tells Lottery legal manager to pay punitive costs

Advertorial:
Court tells Lottery legal manager to pay punitive costs:

The new board and management of the National Lotteries Commission is taking action to end corruption at the institution.

  • Suspended National Lotteries Commision (NLC) legal boss has failed in her bid to halt disciplinary proceedings against her.
  • Johannesburg Acting High Court Judge Johan Moorcroft ordered that she pay punitive costs, noting that her urgent application was a delay tactic.
  • Gugulethu Yako has been charged with taking money from an NLC beneficiary.
  • Judge Moorcraft said she must answer the allegations and present her case at the disciplinary hearing.

Gugulethu Yako, the suspended legal manager at the NLC who is facing charges of taking money from a grant beneficiary, has failed in an urgent court bid to stop disciplinary proceedings against her.

Johannesburg Acting High Court Judge Johan Moorcroft this week dismissed the application and ordered Yako to pay punitive costs, noting that: “It is impossible to avoid the inference that this application is a tactic to delay, rather than finalise the disciplinary proceedings in good time.”

Read the judgment here

Yako sought orders setting aside a decision to suspend her and institute disciplinary proceedings ahead of a review application in which she seeks to overturn the findings of the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) against her.

Yako was suspended by the head of the NLC Jodi Scholtz in October 2023.

She was charged in December and informed in January that advocate Mandla Mkhatshwa had been appointed to preside over the disciplinary hearing.

Judge Moorcroft said the urgent application had been brought some six months after her suspension and “no explanation is provided for this delay”.

Yako also challenged the appointment of Advocate Mkhatshwa, which the judge said had no merit. He had been appointed in compliance with the NLC supply chain management process and met the requirements.

Yako also complained that she had been suspended by Scholtz and not by the board.

But the chairperson of the board confirmed that it had approved this action.

“She has been on full pay and benefits since October 2023. Serious charges have been brought against her, namely that she benefited financially from a grant beneficiary of the NLC. This is strictly prohibited,” Judge Moorcroft said.

“She admits that various amounts were paid into her bank account but says these were payments made by a suitor who at the time wanted to impress upon her that he was in a financial position to care for her. They subsequently did enter into a relationship,” he said.

When the disciplinary hearing convened in February, Yoko had objected to its continuation because she was in the process of filing the review application to set aside the report of the SIU which formed the basis of her suspension.

“It is argued that the report is unlawful and the applicant was not afforded a hearing before the SIU made its recommendations,” Judge Moorcraft said.

However, he said, the very purpose of the disciplinary hearing was to afford her an opportunity to present her case and answer to the charges brought.

“The purpose of the review application and this urgent application is to prevent the hearing from continuing.”

He said Advocate Mkhatshwa had exercised his discretion when he ruled that the hearing must continue regardless and this discretion was not open to attack on any grounds or legality.

“Nothing in the papers support an argument that her rights have been threatened. Her audi alteram rights [her right to have her side of the story heard] are intact. She is entitled to dispute the allegations and the evidence presented against her but she is not entitled to prevent the investigation of complaints or to prevent a disciplinary hearing from taking place,” he said.

He dismissed the application with an order for punitive costs.

© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.

Read More at GroundUp

– MyZA

CLICK HERE to submit your news to www.MyPR.co.za.

Click here to submit your South African News – free.

Prepaid Meters: Straton Prepaid

Category: Tag: , , , , , ,

The World’s Largest Man-Made Urban Forest

One of the most surprising facts about Johannesburg is its status as a “green” city. When the first settlers arrived, the Highveld was a barren, treeless grassland (savannah). To support the mining industry, millions of trees were imported and planted to provide timber for mine underground supports. Fast forward to the present day, and Johannesburg is widely considered the largest man-made urban forest in the world.

There are an estimated 10 million trees within the city limits. This includes 1.2 million trees on sidewalks and in parks, and over 4.8 million in private gardens. This forest is so dense that satellite images of the northern suburbs often resemble a tropical rainforest. The most iconic of these trees is the Jacaranda, which was imported from South America in the early 20th century. Every October and November, the city turns a vibrant shade of purple as thousands of Jacarandas bloom simultaneously. However, this “forest” also highlights the city’s historical inequality; during the Apartheid era, trees were predominantly planted in wealthy white suburbs, leaving townships like Soweto as dusty plains. In the last two decades, “Greening Soweto” initiatives have seen hundreds of thousands of trees planted to bridge this “green divide,” emphasizing the role of urban forestry in social justice and climate cooling.