State adopts new anti-graft measures

Cape Town - The government is about to issue stringent regulations to crack down on corruption in supply chain management, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said on Tuesday.

Addressing the parliamentary finance committee, Gordhan said the accountant general would issue a circular within the next 24 hours to all branches of government to ensure that procurement processes were as watertight as they could be.

The regulations would apply to national and provincial government departments, constitutionally-mandated institutions and the various companies owned by the state.

Gordhan said departments would have to issue a tender programme for the coming financial year.

"In other words, you can't just get up one morning and decide you want to issue a tender," he said.

He said the National Treasury was developing a monitoring mechanism to ensure these regulations would be enforced.

In the interests of transparency, all details of the tender and the companies that submit bids would have to be published on the relevant department's website.

The details of the successful bidders must be published on the department's website and this would include names, prices, and variations to the original contracts.

Gordhan said this was an important control mechanism to ensure disclosure of the names and details of all directors and key officials of companies involved.

"This would enable us to verify if any key officials are in service with the state and whether they have previously been restricted from doing business with the state, and whether they are linked to entities that have been restricted from doing business with the state," he said.

Gordhan said the first 100 names of individuals and entities that had been restricted from doing business with the state had been published on the National Treasury website.