Gangster State

He said the entire contract was a ‘sham’. ‘The old houses with asbestos
roofs are usually concentrated in the same area in each township, and
the municipalities have records of where those houses are located,’ he
told me. In other words, the asbestos audit was completely
unnecessary. A current FSHS staffer agreed. ‘The location of houses
with asbestos roofs forms part of a dataset for government’s discount
benefit scheme. Government already sat with this information, so the
asbestos audit was not necessary,’ this source said.
Also, when the AG’s office went over the work submitted by
Blackhead and Diamond Hill, it found that many of the houses in the
report had been duplicated. ‘You would see a picture of house number
20 in a certain township, and, a few pages later, you would again see
the same house. This happened with more than one house,’ my source
in the AG’s office told me.
Even if the department could somehow justify the audit, we now
know that ‘only’ R 21 million went to the company that did the actual
work. This left plenty of cash for all manner of indulgences, including
luxury cars. A few weeks after the second payment from the FSHS,
Mpambani treated himself to a Bentley Continental GT. It was a
second-hand model from a local dealership in Vanderbijlpark, but it
nevertheless cost the businessman R 1. 2 million. Ominously, this is the
vehicle he would die in about two years later. Mpambani later bought
more luxury vehicles and a string of upmarket properties.
Shortly after Mpambani bought the Bentley, he received an invitation
to Magashule’s 2015 State of the Province Address, which was
scheduled for 24 February. The invitation had been sent by an
employee from C-Squared, a controversial events-management
company whose owner is said to be close to Magashule.^1 Documents in