Pretoria – Tenders worth about R16 billion which were awarded by Eskom to Actom and Steinmuller Africa to provide maintenance and outage repair services at its 15 coal-fired power stations have been declared unlawful.
Moneyweb reported the contracts had been set aside by the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria.
Judge Anthony Millar was cited ordering Eskom to conduct a fresh tender process and setting aside the contracts until the finalisation of the fresh tender process.
The tenders were awarded to Actom and Steinmuller in October last year.
The judgment comes after Babcock Ntuthuko Engineering lodged an application for the court to review, set aside and declare the contracts unlawful.
The company is said to have taken legal action after it was disqualified from the tender process for failing to comply with requirements in the request for proposals.
Steinmuller was awarded eight power stations and Actom seven.
Meanwhile, the power utility told Business Report it was chasing up close to R1 billion in overdue payments from its Mozambique counterpart, Electricidade De Moçambique (EDM), including disputed amounts from 2019.
This as South Africa seeks to secure more electricity and gas supplies from the country.
Eskom, with a debt burden of more than R400bn, which the National Treasury has pledged to help with, is scraping the bottom of the barrel for its outstanding payments, including R52bn it is owed by local municipalities.
It has to fork out billions for diesel and infrastructure maintenance.
Eskom head of transmission Segomoco Scheepers revealed that the utility was pursuing payments from Mozambique, at Eskom’s state of the system briefing this week.
This was in contrast to its regional clients, including Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, eSwatini and Zimbabwe, which were fully paid up.
“We do not have issues with our international clients, it is only with Mozambique that we are pursuing payment for some disputed amounts and then some agreed upon amounts that are not paid up. We are in mediation,“ Scheepers said.
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