The City of Johannesburg has recovered R107-million following the arrest of 22 people allegedly involved in corruption, collusion, fraud and tampering with the city’s electricity systems, which had ultimately cost the city R200-million in lost revenue.

Executive mayor Parks Tau on Thursday told members of the media attending a briefing at the City of Johannesburg’s municipal offices, in Braamfontein, that the remaining R93-million in lost revenue had been accounted for in the city’s balance sheet and that ten more arrests would be made in the next two weeks.

Ongoing investigations had identified at least 30 large power users in Johannesburg as having defrauded the city.

Meanwhile, of those already arrested, two were City Power employees and two City of Johannesburg employees. External contractors and members of the public were also discovered to have participated in criminal activities resulting in the revenue losses.

In the last two weeks, an additional 61 cases of illegal activity within the city had been established, adding to the 48 cases under investigation.

Tau revealed that the city was receiving weekly updates from City Power on illegal activities and was also working closely with the National Prosecuting Authority, the Hawks and the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department in terms of the investigation.
He stressed that the city would continue to pursue offenders and safeguard taxpayers’ funds, and added that stringent security measures were being implemented to prevent criminal activities at the city’s power stations and substations.

“The city is in the process of installing integrated and biometric security systems to manage and monitor access into power stations and substations. Pylon vibrations monitoring systems that will detect vandalism are also being installed at substations, which are being monitored 24/7,” he said.

He assured the public that many power outages in the city were as a result of criminal activities and not owing to loadshedding, pointing out that an average of 32% of all power outages each month occurred as a result of theft and vandalism.

Further, 16% of power outages were caused by damage done by third parties and 12% are in relation to stolen cables and illegal connections.

Tau asserted that more stringent legislation was needed to deal with the issues of cable theft and illegal electricity connections and suggested that the regular connection of electricity to informal settlements would reduce the propensity of people connecting to the system illegally.

“The city has been a victim of deplorable acts, which have resulted in unplanned outages. We are dealing with power outages caused by criminal activities and we encourage customers to report any power outages or suspicious activities on any power system as soon as possible for the city to respond more speedily,” he urged.

Members of the public could provide anonymous tip-offs on illegal connections, cable theft and vandalism and tampering to 0800 002 587 or vandalism and cable theft incidents to 011 490 7911/7900/7553.