Johannesburg - The SAA board has formally charged its chief commercial officer, Sylvain Bosc, with misleading it and the Treasury on the Abu Dhabi route.
Business Report can reveal that Bosc was served with the charges yesterday following a forensic investigation by law firm ENSafrica and placed officially on suspension.
SAA sources said the probe concluded that there were sufficient grounds to institute a disciplinary hearing.
“It is true that Bosc has been served with the charges and he would be expected to answer to them,” said a source.
“The board would not have been naive to serve him with the papers if there was not enough evidence. That is why they felt confident enough to charge him.”
Bosc, a French national who was allegedly recruited by former chief executive Monwabisi Kalawe, could not be reached for comment.
But the sources claimed that the board believed he had manipulated figures and deliberately withheld two other reports that showed that the route was not profitable.
SAA said the route to Abu Dhabi, which was meant to also fly passengers to and from China and India, had already cost it losses amounting to nearly R400 million.
“The whole thing could be put squarely on to his (Bosc) and (former chief financial officer Wolf) Meyer’s shoulders,” said a source. “You would expect them to be on top of the situation and alert the airline in case there are problems, but they chose to add to the problems.”
Bosc allegedly ignored advice from a former SAA international network planner and a specialist aviation team that had been put together to probe the viability of the route.
Bosc is said to have told SAA that the route would have a high number of tickets and a passenger load factor of nearly 80 percent.
The load factor, or capacity utlisation, measures the utilisation of airlines, taking into consideration how seats are filled and the fares.
The route, which was eventually found to have a load factor of only about 40 percent, was opened to fly passengers between South Africa and the United Arab Emirates, as well as to China and India.
It is dominated by the so-called M3 airlines: Etihad, Qatar Airways and Emirates.
“There was a very clear manipulation of information and deliberate manipulation of figures by overstating figures and numbers without any substance,” said another source.
The board took this information to the Treasury to get Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene’s approval.
“This should be a serious charge because it left SAA in a position where it suffered huge financial losses,” a source said
Three weeks ago, the board placed Bosc on forced leave and suspended Meyer, who then resigned on Monday.
Although Meyer has dismissed the allegations as a witch hunt against him, the chairwoman of the SAA board audit and risk committee, Yakhe Kwinana, on Wednesday told Parliament that an investigation by Ernst & Young auditors had uncovered major irregularities, which cost the airline R648m in the first six months of the current financial year.
Kwinana said the airline’s porous coffers were a result of poor financial and procurement planning, despite most of its planes flying at full capacity.
She said that in some instances, money from ticket sales was fraudulently misdirected from SAA coffers into accounts held by individuals in some countries.
BUSINESS REPORT