South African lottery corruption uncovered

The extent of corruption uncovered within South Africa’s National Lotteries Commission is “worse than imagined”, said the organisation’s chairman, Professor Barney Pityana, in a radio interview.

The NLC is designed to channel funds to charities and other worthy causes, but the recent discovery of corruption has shocked the organisation itself and the country’s regulators.

Professor Pityana said the commission is now working with the banking sector to weed out the corruption, an ongoing task taken up by the Special Investigating Unit. The investigators found that theft and money laundering in the organisation amounts to R1.4bn (US$77.1m).

He said that having now worked on the investigation for two months,

“The situation was “worse than I can imagine. We are working on that and we are now working with the banks to see what is happening with the accounts that might be linked with suspicious activities. It is believed that some organisations, as beneficiaries, received funding and Pityana added that the accounts were cleaned out and channelled to two unnamed people within NLC.”

The NLC commission Charlotte Thabang Mampane resigned in August “with a cloud of corruption hanging over her head.”

Gaming for Africa added:

“The National Lotteries Commission says it is now investigating, with the help of the banks, a number of instances of fraud and theft of money going missing after being allocated to various infrastructure projects. The commission also says it allocated nearly R65m ($3.5m) to complete several multi-million rand infrastructure projects but they have been left unfinished.”

Source: intergameonline.com

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