[imagesource:Penguin Random House]

Despite Eskom’s financial struggles, the state-owned enterprise revealed that the former CEO Andre de Ruyter took home a sizeable remuneration package for the year 2023.

De Ruyter received a whopping R6,9 million in the 2023 financial year, which happens to be slightly less than the R7.1 million he received the year before.

This lekker remuneration included a basic salary of R6.453 million and other payments of R456,000, which works out to around R20,000 per day. Must be nice to take that load home while still having called out the ailing company in a book and then leaving them high and dry.

In contrast – and this is where it gets more juicy – former Eskom CFO and now interim CEO, Calib Cassim, earned just R5.5 million in 2023 – a 9% increase from the R5.05 million he earned in 2022.

These numbers are straight out of Eskom’s books, which published its consolidated annual financial results, where they even reported a massive financial loss to the company, per BusinessTech:

In its full-year financials for the 12 months ending 31 March 2023 on Tuesday (31 October), Eskom reported a massive loss of R23.9 billion for the 2022/23 financial year, exacerbated by a huge escalation in load shedding, mounting municipal debt and skyrocketing losses due to criminal activity.

De Ruyter has been in the news of late for lifting the tight lid on Eskom’s rife corruption and government involvement, also admitting to failing to prevent load-shedding in South Africa.

He revealed how organised criminal cartels linked to politicians were stealing around R1 billion per month from the power utility, calling out the government for being more interested in short-term political gains over long-term sustainability for the country.

Meanwhile, Eskom has noted mounting losses related to irregular and wasteful expenditure as well as losses attributed to criminal activity.

In terms of wasteful expenditure, Eskom said it only incurred R105 million of new expenditure categorised as fruitless or wasteful, R2 million of which was recovered. The group also ended the year with a massive R6 billion of “material losses” attributed to criminal activity.

The group’s closing balance was R91.15 billion for the year. A new chief executive has yet to be appointed.

[source:businesstech]