The e-toll collection contracts which Sanral signed with Electronic Toll Collections (ETC) were rewritten without going through a public process, changing the lengths of the contracts.
That’s according to the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse which this week questioned the legality of collecting e-tolls after December 3, as even with the maximum two-year extension, the original contracts would expire on December 2, 2020.
But Sanral then announced that it had extended the collection contract to December 2, 2021 and that this was legal, Outa explains.
Two Sanral officials are quoted as saying the extension to December 2021 took the contract to “the maximum eight-year period as was allowed for in the original contract” the organisation has revealed.
However, the three original contracts did not have these timelines, Outa explains.
“There are three main contracts for running the e-tolls: the Open Road Tolling (ORT), the Transaction Clearing House (TCH) and the Violation Processing Centre (VPC). The original contracts were signed in 2009 but all started running from December 3, 2013, when the e-tolls were switched on. The ORT contract was for eight years, and the TCH and VPC contracts each five years. It is understood that the TCH and VPC contracts had options to renew for a further two years.
“That would have ended the TCH and VPC contracts – needed to collect e-tolls and pursue defaulters – by December 2, 2020 at the latest.”
But according to Outa, Sanral “quietly changed the ETC contracts in mid-2017, changing all three of them to six-year contracts, and giving all of them the option of a one-year or two-year extension. That takes the maximum contract length for all three to December 2, 2021. The change is believed to have been signed in April 2017, just a month after the minister of transport told Parliament in March 2017 that the ORT contract was eight years and the TCH and VPC contracts were each five years”.
Outa says it found confirmation of the change in a reply to Parliament on April 10, 2019, when the minister of transport confirmed the change in the contracts but did not specify when this had taken place, and said that the changed agreement had been approved by the National Treasury.
“However, Sanral omitted to clarify this in public.”
