Lewis Group has dismissed allegations of wrongdoing relating to the practice of cancelling credit transactions in default and reinvoicing them as cash sales, saying this did not affect provisions for future bad debt. In an interlocutory application that will be heard in the high court on Thursday, Lewis has applied to have a request for detailed information on this practice denied. David Woollam, a director of Summit Financial Partners, who has brought the request, has said that Lewis had been understating its bad debt. This comes after current and former Lewis employees told Summit that the practice of cancelling nonperforming credit transactions and restating them as cash sales was common. In an affidavit, Leon Mocke, Lewis’s regional manager for the west coast, said that R1.7m in credit transactions across seven branches were cancelled during the February-March 2016 internal "write-off period". These were restated as cash transactions to avoid writing them off as bad debt, Mocke ...
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