We did nothing wrong, says municipality over multi-million rand VBS investments
The West Rand District Municipality maintains that it did not flout any regulations by investing millions of rand with the looted VBS Mutual Bank. In a statement issued on Friday, the municipality said its relationship with the bank dated back to February 2015 and, up until VBS was placed under curatorship three years later in March 2018, no institutions other than the Treasury raised a query about its investment. The municipality said that an email from the Treasury in August 2017 on the matter was “neither an instruction nor a directive”; it was instead “vague and presented no basis in law why investments with VBS Mutual Bank were not permitted”. “The email fails to further flag the purported deviation. Hence our continued belief that such have been and remain complaint with the Municipal Finance Management Act and its regulations,” the municipality said. “On the date of the curatorship, the municipality held investments totalling R76m comprising conditional grants. These grants c...
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