R7 billion. That's what ABB and McKinsey have paid South Africa to close the book on its biggest corporate corruption cases.A court might now order some of that money handed back.And the challenge doesn't come from a whistleblower or a watchdog. It comes from Matshela Koko, one of the men the settlements were meant to help hold accountable.If a R2.5 billion settlement, paid and banked in 2022, can still be unwound today, what is a settlement actually worth?Our latest article unpacks the court battle, who carries the risk if the deal collapses, and why your legacy contracts may hold the same exposure without anyone having gone looking for it.Neither ABB nor McKinsey uncovered these problems through their ordinary governance processes. Whistleblowers, foreign prosecutors and leaked documents forced the issue. By then, cooperating was no longer optional.Would your business survive that kind of discovery arriving from the outside?Click below to read the full article.https://lnkd.in/dhzbssQ6hashtag#ForensicServices hashtag#CorporateGovernance hashtag#FraudRisk hashtag#SouthAfrica hashtag#AntiCorruption

A simple call to get a power line fixed cost this resident R40,000, money she had to take out of her bond.That is the story of one Parkhurst resident extorted by people wearing City Power's authority but not its uniform. The R40, 000 was ostensibly for back payments she owed (she actually owed nothing), but she was told that she would not get her power back until she paid them.Her neighbour lost power for four days because her "reconnection" left them disconnected instead. A former employee says he has been extorted to the tune of R2.6 million since 2020, by people he names as his own former colleagues. He is now living with death threats against his children.This is not load shedding. This is not even ordinary corruption. This is City Power and Eskom workers using the grid itself as a weapon against the people who pay for it.Our latest article looks at what happens when public infrastructure becomes a tool for extortion, why the people meant to protect citizens are the ones preying on them, and what it will take to stop it.Click below to read the full article.https://lnkd.in/deeXucYF

Speaking up about fraud in South Africa can get you killed.Babita Deokaran was murdered for it. So were many others. Yet whistleblowers remain the single most effective weapon against corporate fraud, uncovering 45% of cases. External audits manage just 5%.Despite this, fewer than 15 countries in Africa have laws that properly protect the people who come forward. Most companies still run paper-based reporting systems that can't guarantee anonymity, and a third of whistleblowers report straight to a direct supervisor instead of a hotline. That means your company's defence against fraud often comes down to one manager's judgment call.Your business can have every compliance framework in place and still be exposed, because none of it works if the person who spots the fraud has nowhere safe to go.So ask yourself: if someone in your business spotted fraud tomorrow, would they risk everything to tell you, or would they stay quiet?Read the full article to see what's broken, and what real protection actually looks like.https://lnkd.in/eZyH3WGU

There is a reasonable chance that a fraud scheme is operating inside your organisation in South Africa right now. Many organisations focus heavily on creating controls while spending far less time assessing whether those controls can be manipulated, circumvented, or overridden by trusted insiders. They can and they are!It may not look dramatic from the outside. The payments may appear legitimate. The supporting documents may be in place. The approvals may look routine. The people involved may be trusted, experienced, and well-regarded. They may sit in finance, procurement, operations, or senior management. They may understand the control environment better than the people responsible for monitoring it.That is what makes modern occupational fraud so dangerous.Click below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dNUjJZNW

The strongest fraud schemes are rarely the smartest. They're the ones that go unnoticed the longest.A fraud uncovered in six months costs an average of $40,000. Leave it hidden for five years and that figure explodes to more than $1.1 million. The theft is only part of the story. The real damage often comes from legal costs, reputational harm, leadership distraction, and the erosion of trust that follows. In this article, we explore why detection speed has become one of the most important measures of corporate governance, where fraud is most likely to occur, why senior executives can create the largest losses, and what organisations can do to identify problems before they become crises.If you think fraud prevention is enough, this article may change your perspective. The real competitive advantage is detecting it early. Click the link below to read the full article;https://lnkd.in/dXzZwmxC

Someone in your organisation is probably stealing from you right now. Not a junior clerk sneaking petty cash. Someone who knows the systems, knows the controls, and knows exactly how long they can run a scheme before anyone notices. According to the ACFE's Occupational Fraud 2026: A Report to the Nations, the typical fraud runs for 12 months before it is detected. At the executive level, it runs for 23 months before it is detected.That number deserves a moment.Nearly two years. Nearly two full annual audit cycles. Two sets of signed management accounts. Two rounds of board presentations. All while the fraud continues.Please click below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dcCZsQSj

For years, Steinhoff looked exactly like the kind of company investors trust.It had international operations, respected executives, sophisticated reportingstructures, external auditors, market credibility, and the appearance of strongleadership. It was seen as one of South Africa’s great corporate successstories.Which is precisely why what happened next was so disturbing.When accounting irregularities became public in December 2017, Steinhoff’s share price dropped by more than 95%. Investors, including pension funds, suffered heavy losses, and South Africa’s corporate sector was forced to confront a deeply uncomfortable reality: fraud can live for years inside organisations that look disciplined, successful, and well governed. (SciELO)The shock was not simply that fraud had occurred. The shock was that it had happened inside a company that looked so controlled.That is the part many boards and executive teams still struggle to face.Please click the link to read the full article - https://lnkd.in/dhm7Pi7Q

South Africans are the undisputed world champions of the "MacGyver" lifestyle. Living in this country is like living in an ongoing episode of a survival reality show.When the taps run dry, we perform a rain dance toward our JoJo tanks. When the lights go out we recreate romantic 19th-century candlelit vigils, and we’ve learned to navigate potholes with the precision of lunar rover pilots. With true South African resilience, we’ve decided that if the state won't provide the basics, we’ll just build a parallel universe in our backyards.But you can’t JoJo tank a child’s education.You can’t "load-shed" their ability to read, there is no "workaround" for a missing textbook, and you certainly can’t bypass a corrupt procurement process by lighting a few extra candles and hoping for the best.Our children trust us to make sure they have the tools they need to make a better future for themselves and our country. But when the evil tendrils of corruption start wrapping themselves around our schools, threatening to deprive our children of their sacred right to an education, we cannot simply “make-a-plan” our way out of it.Click the link below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dy-_XYpf

Every war in modern history carries two parallel stories. One plays out on the battlefield, in bombed cities, in refugee columns, in casualty figures. The other plays out in boardrooms, government budgets, and commodity markets. Understanding both stories does not require taking a side. It requires following the money and counting the human cost.Wars rarely have a single cause. They accumulate pressure over years, combining strategic interests, resource competition, historical grievances, internal political pressures, and ideology. What they share is that at some point, the key decision-makers concluded that the cost of fighting was lower than the cost of continued restraint.Click the link below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dx9dBpMj

5.15am, her alarm goes off. She gets up early because they have not had power for two weeks so she needs to make a fire to boil water for breakfast and coffee for the family. She drives to work through the Johannesburg suburbs on roads so pot-holed, you would think you were in deepest, darkest Africa. She passes a train station that no longer has running trains. She stops at a traffic light that has not worked in months. When she finally arrives at the office, she has already paid the corruption tax four times.By now you should be asking yourself, ‘Where did the money go?’The money that was supposed to build power stations that work, roads that do not eat tyres, trains that actually run, taps that deliver clean water. Hundreds of billions of rand, collected from your taxes, your VAT, your fuel levies, your rates. Money that was supposed to build a country. GONE!This is not a political debate. It is about something far more basic: the gap between the life you are living right now, and the life you would be living if the money meant for infrastructure and services had not been stolen by people who were supposed to serve you.Click below to read the full story;https://lnkd.in/dFcc8ds3