Johannesburg – A former senior accountant at Vodacom has dropped a bombshell by stating under oath the group is lying that it does not have data to work out the revenue generated from the Please Call Me (PCM) concept.
Teboho Motaung, who joined Vodacom in 1995 as a trainee accountant and left as a senior accountant in 2017, detailed in an affidavit that the telecoms giant actually undertook an accounting exercise to look into revenue streams linked to PCM.
The explosive affidavit has been deposed to the court due to hear another legal bout between Vodacom and PCM inventor Nkosana Makate.
In the looming square off, Vodacom will bring a variation application before Judge Jody Kollapen at the North Gauteng High Court.
The group wanted Judge Kollapen to amend his June ruling that ordered it to give Makate key documents detailing financial and contractual data spanning 18 years.
Makate needed the key documents to prove that Vodacom owed him more than the R47 million they offered him for his pioneering invention.
The former accountant at Vodacom sought R20bn for his invention.
Vodacom submitted in an affidavit that Judge Kollapen’s ruling was bad in law because it required it to do the impractical and supply data it no longer had.
“(Vodacom) submits … its obligation is only to provide such source documentation that’s available,” Vodacom’s chief officer for legal, compliance and risk, Nkateko Nyoka, said under oath.
Motaung said he observed with shock how Vodacom executives repeatedly told courts, including the Constitutional Court, that there were no full records to work out revenue generated from PCM.
“What disturbed me, particularly, was the fact that I had read in relation to affidavits made by senior officials at Vodacom as far as back as 2010 allegations that Vodacom kept no records which would allow it to calculate the number of return calls triggered by Please Call Me SMSes and hence could not calculate the revenue earned from Please Call Me,” he said.
“I knew this to be highly improbable if not impossible.”
He said his “intimate knowledge of Vodacom’s financial systems led me to believe that it would be a quite simple exercise for Vodacom to make, at least, an informed estimate as to the revenue earned by the Please Call Me product”.
Motaung revealed that such an exercise was, in fact, carried out in 2015 when Makate and Vodacom locked horns at the Concourt.
The court ordered Vodacom to negotiate in good faith with Makate to determine reasonable compensation for his invention. The negotiations deadlocked last year.
Said Motaung: “I was personally requested by Mrs Hannelie Patterson, who had been my previous immediate supervisor at Vodacom, to give her guidance as to where certain aspects of revenue earned by Please Call Me could be recorded and calculated.
“The instruction was simply to investigate, identify and calculate the revenue streams from various ledgers showing sources of income related to Please Call Me as returned calls on Please Call Me SMSes all of which are derived from dedicated ledgers.
“The instruction went further and required the staff to go back as far as possible with the investigation and calculation,” Motaung added.
He said this exercise, which saw “a number of personnel placed under pressure to provide the information as expeditiously and fully as possible”, lasted for two to three weeks.
Motaung said in his papers that he learnt from the group’s SAP system that possible figures had been worked out.
“I was profoundly shocked by what I discovered. It demonstrated to me that Vodacom’s repeated protestations, some under oath, that it was unable to derive a figure for revenue because of the use of the Please Call Me product was false.”
In his affidavit, Makate also poured cold water on Vodacom’s submission it no longer had some of the financial records he wanted.
“In my eight years working experience at Vodacom, we never lost any underlying financial data because computer back-ups were done daily under the Common Directory that all our computers were connected to,” he said.
“When I left Vodacom in August 2003, the Oracle system had also retained detailed data since the formation of the company.”
The Star