Bureaucratic bungling is what a travel company, whose directors include Basetsana Kumalo, has apparently fallen victim to after the Department of Labour instituted legal proceedings against it for operating without a transformation plan.
On Friday, the department withdrew its legal action against Travel With Flair (TWF), whose chief executive is Kumalo’s sister, Johanna Mukoki, after the company proved that it had been filing its employment equity plans and was complying with the law.
Department of Labour spokesperson Teboho Thejane did not respond to messages requesting comment, sent to him on Friday.
However, another official in the department confirmed that the case had been dropped and would be formally withdrawn from court tomorrow.
Last week, City Press reported that TWF, which had allegedly been contracted by the Department of Labour to facilitate travel arrangements for its officials for a decade, had its contract extended without renewing its employment equity plan. The company was one of 72 that the department was taking action against for operating without the legally required plans.
But this week, Mukoki said they had indeed filed their plans last year as required and had received an automatically generated response that the department had received them. However, the official they had previously dealt with had resigned, and their calls to check that the department had received the documents were not answered.
'No equity scandal'
"There is no equity scandal here. TWF is fully compliant and the matter has been withdrawn," said Mukoki.
"We won the most empowered business of the year last year, adjudged by Empowerdex, which compiles a rigorous scorecard and we are level one. You don’t get higher.
"They check management and staff; we even have our own training academy. We go way beyond the call of duty. The majority of our staff are black and the majority are women."
According to figures supplied by Mukoki, of TWF’s 700 staff, 577 are broadly black, including 486 African staff, and 123 are white. About 85% of the company’s staff are women.
"After they sent us a lawyer’s letter saying we had not sent the employment equity plan, we sent a response and resubmitted all the plans and required information to the new official who was dealing with it," Mukoki said.
"At a meeting with the department’s legal advisers, the [legal] action was withdrawn."