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By Bongani Nkosi 
13h ago
Johannesburg – A former senior Vodacom accountant dropped a bomb by claiming under oath that the group is lying that it has no data to calculate the revenue generated by the Please Call Me (PCM) concept.
Teboho Motaung, who joined Vodacom in 1995 as a trainee accountant and left as a senior accountant in 2017, detailed in an affidavit that the telecommunications giant actually conducted an accounting exercise to analyze revenue streams linked to PCM.
The explosive affidavit has been deposited with the court as another legal fight between Vodacom and PCM inventor Nkosana Makate will be heard.
In the upcoming plaza, Vodacom will file a variance request with Judge Jody Kollapen in North Gauteng Superior Court.
The group wanted Judge Kollapen to amend his June ruling ordering him to provide Makate with key documents detailing financial and contractual data spanning 18 years.
Makate needed the key documents to prove that Vodacom owed him more than the R47 million they offered him for his pioneering invention.
The former Vodacom accountant requested 20 billion rand for his invention.
Vodacom submitted in an affidavit that Judge Kollapen’s ruling was incorrect in law because it required it to do the impractical and provide data it no longer had.
“(Vodacom) submits … their obligation is only to provide the source documentation that is available,” Vodacom’s director of legal affairs, compliance and risk, Nkateko Nyoka, said under oath.
Motaung said he observed with surprise how Vodacom executives repeatedly told the courts, including the Constitutional Court, that there were no complete records to calculate the revenue generated by PCM.
“What bothered me in particular was the fact that I had read in connection with affidavits made by senior Vodacom officials since 2010 allegations that Vodacom had no records that would allow it to calculate the number of callbacks caused by Please Call me SMS and therefore could not calculate the income earned from Please Call Me, ”he said.
“I knew this was highly unlikely, if not impossible.”
He said his “in-depth knowledge of Vodacom’s financial systems led me to believe that it would be a fairly simple exercise for Vodacom to make at least an informed estimate of the revenue earned from the Please Call Me product.”
Motaung revealed that, in fact, such an exercise took place in 2015 when Makate and Vodacom clashed at the Concourt.
The court ordered Vodacom to negotiate in good faith with Makate to determine reasonable compensation for his invention. Negotiations stalled last year.
Said Motaung: “Ms. Hannelie Patterson, who had been my previous immediate supervisor at Vodacom, personally asked me for guidance on where certain aspects of Please Call Me income could be recorded and calculated.
“The instruction was simply to research, identify and calculate revenue streams from various ledgers showing Please Call Me related revenue sources as Please Call Me SMS returned calls, all of which are derived from dedicated ledgers. .
“The drill went further and required the staff to go back as far as possible with the investigation and the calculation,” Motaung added.
He said this exercise, which saw “a number of staff under pressure to provide information as quickly and completely as possible”, lasted for two to three weeks.
Motaung said in his documents that he learned from the group’s SAP system that possible figures had been produced.
“I was deeply shocked by what I discovered. It proved to me that Vodacom’s repeated protests, some under oath, that it was unable to obtain an income figure due to use of the Please Call Me product, were false. “
In his own affidavit, Makate also poured cold water on Vodacom’s claim that it no longer had some of the financial records it wanted.
“In my eight years of work experience at Vodacom, we never lost any underlying financial data because computer backups were performed daily under the common directory that all of our computers were connected to,” he said.
“When I left Vodacom in August 2003, the Oracle system had also retained detailed data since the formation of the company.”
The star
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