NATIONAL NEWS - The National Lotteries Commission (NLC) has paid out millions of rands more in grants to organisations already involved in questionable, unfinished Lottery-funded projects.
This was revealed in a leaked list of payments made from April to December 2019.
In several cases the projects had ground to a halt because they ran out of money and the service providers, many of them small businesses, struggled to be paid.
GroundUp scrutinised the leaked list of payments made to organisations. They found payments to non-profits involved in projects that they had previously exposed as part of their ongoing reporting on maladministration, nepotism and corruption involving Lottery funding.
Several of these projects were included in an “independent investigation” by auditors Sekela Xabiso “into allegations of improper use of funds intended for good causes” according to a document submitted to Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry.
It is not known whether any of these organisations received additional funding in the 2018/19 financial year because the NLC has refused to publish a list of Lottery-funded grantees for that period, something it had done for the previous 18 years when it first began funding “good causes”.
