Road Accident Fund executives must be charged for misleading Parliament
7 February 2024
The DA will be pursuing charges against Road Accident Fund (RAF) executives, under the Powers, Privileges and Immunities of Parliaments and Provincial Legislatures Act, 2004, for misleading Parliament by repeatedly insisting on using an accounting standard that falsifies the RAF’s current debt profile by as much as 90%.
RAF CEO, Collins Letsoalo, and the RAF Board are asking Parliament to exercise its oversight role on financial statements that are misleading and do not reflect the true nature of RAF’s debt position, which at this point is estimated to be R300 billion. Such misrepresentation of information essentially amounts to fraud.
Courts have previously ruled that presenting false information to Parliament is fraud, stating that “If Parliament is misled, or if individual members thereof are misled, whether expressly or by the withholding of information that must be disclosed, it stands to reason that they have been defrauded if the intention to mislead was present in the mind of the perpetrator.”
By refusing to discard an accounting standard called the Generally Accepted Accounting Standards 3 as instructed by the Auditor General (A-G) and National Treasury, the RAF – under Letsoalo, may have presented falsified financial statements to Parliament on the entity’s debt profile.