Despite Hangwani Morgan Maumela – the tender don of Tembisa Hospital – being paid R820m in two years through a network of front companies, and now under investigation for alleged procurement fraud, one of his proxy companies has bid for a lucrative North West Health Department catering tender.
Although a News24 investigation has now revealed that fake documents were used in the R1bn bid, Maumela has gone to court to ensure his company gets the tender.
Aloo Construction & Supply, one of 14 companies identified as part of a syndicate helmed by Maumela, bid for a four-year tender – advertised in December – to provide food for 17 hospitals and clinics in the province.
The tender was awarded in June this year to another bid.
By the time of the bid, Maumela’s ties to Aloo had already been in the public domain for nearly three years, and he was being investigated by both the Special Investigations Unit and the Hawks for R2.3bn Tembisa graft.
Despite the falsified documents, though, Aloo managed to successfully obtain an interim interdict in the North West High Court (Mahikeng) preventing the tender’s implementation – with another leg of the court challenge seeking to have the award set aside.
Aloo was established in 2011 and is steered by just one director, Tebogo Sebogodi, appointed in November 2023. Sebogodi replaced Aluwani Titus Maumela, Hangwani Morgan Maumela’s cousin and the previous sole director of Aloo, who died in a car crash around that time.
The company was red flagged along with more than 200 other Tembisa Hospital suppliers as “possibly fraudulent” by whistle-blower Babita Deokaran, three weeks before she was killed in 2021.
Fourteen companies could be linked to Maumela directly, and Sebogodi was also identified in Deokaran’s report through three additional companies with which she traded with the Gauteng Health Department.
At the time, Sebogodi and Maumela appeared unconnected, but they were betrayed by an oversight: both had used the same address to register their respective entities.
That Sebogodi has since been installed as a proxy director of Aloo cements the link, and what proves that Maumela is the controlling mind is an email address submitted to the CIPC: gallopinglimpopo@yahoo.com is the email address on record for Aloo. Galloping Limpopo Three Supplier, of which Maumela is the sole director, used the same email address to correspond with Gauteng Health.
While 14 companies could be directly tied to Maumela, the SIU identified 41 in his network of tender extraction, which claimed nearly R850m in payments from Tembisa Hospital over two years.
Courting controversy
In the interdict application launched in May, Sebogodi claimed the awarding of the North West tender to Stanz Food JV was unlawful.
“It is clear that the department subjected Aloo to an unfair and unreasonable administrative process,” she wrote, and made much of the fact that Aloo is a level one B-BEE contributor and operates from the North West, while Stanz has one white director and, she claimed, is in Gauteng.
But News24 established that Aloo’s B-BEE certificate, issued by Empowerlogic and used in the bid submissions and appended to court papers, was a forgery.
“This certificate (for) ALOO CONSTRUCTION AND SUPPLY has not been issued by EmpowerLogic and has been verified as fraudulent. We will report the fraudulent B-BBEE certificate to the BEE Commission,” the company said in response to questions.
Maumela’s Aloo, in court papers, insisted the registered business and trading addresses were in Mahikeng.
Both appear to be occupied by unrelated businesses, and CIPC data lists the company as registered in Polokwane, Limpopo.
Sky-high pricing
Bid submissions for Aloo and Stanz reveal how the former attempted to engineer a win. Aloo’s prices dwarf those of the winning bidder, in some instances by an exponential amount. Its menu price for adults – three meals a day – is R511, nearly five times higher than the awarded contractor.
Through fixed costs per hospital, in terms of the tender, Aloo undercut the winning bidder and secured an advantage.
This selective structuring of costs supports a façade that Aloo would be more affordable. However, fixed costs are negligible compared to the monthly invoices Aloo would charge for individual patients – with heavily inflated menu items, if they won, the value of the contract would swell into the billions.
Dodgy déjà vu
This month, the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU) preserved assets worth R325m held by the MHR Maumela Family Trust, of which Maumela is a trustee. The total value of Maumela’s assets, as tracked by the SIU, exceeds R500m.
The basis of the asset freeze was a report by the National Treasury’s specialised audit service, as well as a forensic investigation which unearthed payment records outlining how Maumela’s syndicate companies were paid R460m by Gauteng Health, of which R30m was paid to Aloo.
Auditors tracked 63 individual payments for medical supply contracts at Tembisa Hospital and examined four different B-BEE certificates Aloo submitted with its bids. All were forged.
The North West Health Department, in response to questions, said the interdict remained in force, and that it was “unaware” that Aloo was involved in syndicate activity at Tembisa Hospital.
Aloo’s review application has not yet been set down for a hearing.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Boats, Bentleys and buildings seized in Tembisa probe asset haul
Corruption allegations linked to North West hospital tender
North West Health HoD gets bail in alleged corrupt tender case