Owners of Lyttelton shopping centre are in hot water after the City of Tshwane pressed criminal charges against the entity for illegally reconnecting power supply to its premises a week after it was disconnected for owing the municipality more than R3 million.
Finance MMC Jacqui Uys yesterday accompanied some officials to Lyttelton police station, where they opened a case of corruption and tampering with municipal infrastructure against the shopping centre owners.
“We have uncovered a greater ring of corruption which might implicate City officials and therefore we are also launching internal investigations because we, as the City of Tshwane, need to fight where lawlessness is. We need to address it because it is looting, corruption and lawlessness that got us to where we are,” she said.
Uys said power supply was cut off from the shopping centre during last week’s revenue collection drive called Tshwane Ya Tima to recoup millions owed to the municipality by defaulting customers.
She said the business entity would be slapped with a fine of R150 000 for its illegal action.
Municipal spokesperson Lindela Mashigo said: “As part of its revenue collection campaign known as #TshwaneYaTima, the municipality is continuously identifying non-paying businesses, government departments, individual households and residential estates across the city’s seven regions whose accounts are in arrears.”
He said the second disconnection action at the shopping centre should serve as a notice to those who continue to tamper with the city’s infrastructure that their criminal actions would “be met with adequate and decisive action from the municipality, working jointly with the criminal justice cluster”.
A precedent was set in a case where a Mount Frere businessman was sentenced to 12 years’ direct imprisonment by the local regional court on March 9, 2021 for illegal power connection and tampering with Eskom’s infrastructure, he said.
Mashigo recounted that since Monday the City’s finance department had issued more than 100 job cards for both business and residential customers whose accounts were in arrears, worth more than R190m.
“From the list, 50 were successfully disconnected in various areas. These include two student accommodation in Arcadia, part of the Suncardia shopping complex and residential areas. During the disconnections, the municipality also imposed steep fines for meter tampering and illegal connections,” Mashigo said.
During the disconnection drive the municipal teams encountered challenges such as abandoned buildings, vacant land and lack of access to the locked property, preventing them from executing their work.
Mashigo said: “The accounts of the abandoned buildings will be subjected to the debt collection process through legal means to recover money against the properties, while those accounts where access to property was a challenge will be re-issued with full force of our metro police department to enforce access to the termination boxes.”
Pretoria News