Cape Town - Power utility Eskom has denied claims that Zimbabwe had been connecting electricity illegally.
This comes after an article was published on satire website Ihlaya News, reporting that the struggling state owned entity had "just discovered that Zimbabwe had been connecting electricity illegally for years."
"To set the record straight, Eskom has neither recorded shortfalls in its international power reconciliation nor investigated the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA). Energy consumption is accounted through a comprehensive reconciliation process and is independently audited on a regular basis," said Eskom in a statement released on Thursday.
Reports of the illegal connections surfaced as loadshedding in South Africa continues.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, who cut short a trip to Egypt to deal with the crisis, said on Wednesday Eskom will work to stabilise the power grid by the end of March.
In addition to heavy rain, he also blamed suspected sabotage at power stations, which contributed 2 000 megawatts (MW) of lost capacity during the past week's outages and said that needed to be investigated.