Molefe defends pay for extra board meetings

Cape Town – Passenger Rail Agency (Prasa) chairperson Popo Molefe defended the remuneration he received for attending extra board meetings during a parliamentary briefing on Wednesday.

He has since paid back the R680 000 he received for this purpose.

Prasa appeared before Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) over its irregular expenditure of R14.6bn in the 2015/16 financial year. Molefe was asked to elaborate on the additional income he received for attending extra board meetings that had not been approved by Transport Minister Dipuo Peters.  

According to a Sunday Times report, former Prasa CEO Lucky Montana told a radio station that Molefe increased the “number of board meetings from four in a year to 16, dramatically raising the cost of remuneration”.

The other board members have until January 31 2017 to pay back the money, Peters said earlier in response to a parliamentary question.

In Wednesday’s Scopa briefing, Molefe said Prasa is a “very difficult organisation with weak management” and therefore its board is compelled to meet “as much as necessary”.

READ: Prasa admits to 'collapse in controls' in R14.6bn spend

“In private companies, directors get paid for the extra work they do,” Molefe said, “they’re paid in accordance with the application of the baseline.”

Molefe said he has since engaged with Peters as the political head of Prasa who is setting up a committee to deal with the remuneration of extra board meetings.

“There was a dispute over that (board members’ remuneration for extra board meetings) with the auditor general,” Molefe said. “So we as the board said, okay, let’s pay back the money. Once we’ve sorted out the dispute we can be reimbursed. That’s why I paid back the money,” Molefe said.