Sunday Times reports that Eskom has hit out at the slow pace of prosecutions involving people arrested for sabotage and other crimes against the state power utility.

According to General Manager for Security, Karen Pillay, the state-owned power utility has to “micromanage” investigations. “We’ve had to extend support in the sense that we’ve put watching briefs on some of the cases, where we contract legal experts to guide some of these prosecutors, and even the investigative teams on specific matters,” Pillay reported. She went on to indicate: “We’ve had issues such as the unavailability of prosecutors after hours, unavailability and unwillingness of magistrates, having to force commissioned police officers to obtain confessions — this is really challenging and time consuming for us to manage. We have had incidents where individuals have been released on ridiculous amounts of bail. It almost gives one the sense that the severity of the incident, and the impact it has on the bigger scale of the economy, is not taken into consideration. We have also had incidents where a docket had sufficient evidence to warrant continued attention, but there’s been a lack of action in that regard. It’s literally a process of having to walk each case as we present it before the court, almost the process of micromanaging.” However, the National Prosecuting Authority has hit back, saying its specialised units were “highly skilled to deal with complex cases relating to essential infrastructure”. In the past year, the company has opened 16 cases with police relating to sabotage, two of which have been linked to Eskom employees.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Orrin Singh at Sunday Times (subscriber access only)

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