Mamodupi mohlala biography of albert

A financial institution wants to auction fired Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority (PPRA) CEO Mamodupi Mohlala's multi-million-rand home following allegations that she has breached a mortgage loan agreement that was finalised more than a decade ago.

City Press understands that Absa intends to sell the beleaguered Mohlala's glamorous home in Parkwood, Johannesburg, which is currently valued at more than R5m for the bank to recover a sum stipulated as R3.8m that was lent to her in 2007.

According to Absa, Mohlala agreed to repay the sums in monthly instalments shown on the documents as R34 355, which she had paid until August last year.

Her account with the bank has since fallen into arrears and the amount owing is R1 482 004.

An execution application has been unravelling at the Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg).

The bank points out that the amount owed by her is enough to prompt it to hold the house as security.

City Press reported in February 2023 that Mohlala’s woes began when the application for reinstatement at the PPRA was dismissed by the Johannesburg Labour Court.

Mohlala was summarily dismissed in December of that year after a protracted process aimed at investigating several charges against her stalled, with the board accusing her of deliberately causing the delays. 

Late in 2021, the Pension Funds Adjudicator Tribunal found that Mohlala had disregarded scheme rules when she allegedly instructed the entity’s Human Resources Department to suspend the deduction of pension fund contributions for five new employees.

Full City Press report

A bad tempered battle is brewing between Mamodupi Mohlala-Mulaudzi, the now suspended CEO of Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority (PPRA), and the office she used to head, the Pension Funds Adjudicator.

On March 28, the PPRA suspended Mohlala-Mulaudzi based on two specific allegations: that there were irregularities in how certain staff members had been hired, and that she’d withheld some employees’ pension fund contributions.

This last allegation contains added spice precisely because Mohlala-Mulaudzi was herself the Pension Funds Adjudicator between May 2007 to October 2009 – so she ought to have known what the rules were around withhold retirement contributions.

Steve Ngubeni, the chair of the PPRA, told Today’s Trustee: “she has been suspended because of the negligence in her duties and ignoring the law.” Nonetheless, he said, the suspension is “precautionary”, so she will continue to earn her full salary until the investigation is completed.

Controversy appears to follow Mohlala-Mulaudzi.

The problem was, that process took time. At the PPRA, the claims of bullying followed her. Sometimes, trustees of funds lodge complaints with the PFA about this, since section 13A of the Pension Funds Act obliges it to report an employer’s non-compliance.

But the fact that Mohlala-Mulaudzi was the adjudicator herself for two years meant she would have been more aware than most what kind of devastation this can cause.

Kula-Ameyaw says Mohlala-Mulaudzi even used her experience as justification for what she was doing.

But it’s also [because of] the fact that there is a new board in place, and it felt that it must look into that whistleblowers report.”

The PPRA got a new board in November 2021 a few months after Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane took over from Lindiwe Sisulu as the Minister of Human Settlements, and overhauled the property agency’s governance structure.

The Democratic Alliance has long been in a war with Mohlala-Mulaudzi, which reached fever pitch when she hit DA MP Emma Powell with a R1.5m defamation claim for describing her as an “increasingly rogue CEO”.

Powell tells Today’s Trustee she believes the old board simply ignored the raft of serious allegations that had been piling up against Mohlala-Mulaudzi, thereby protecting her.

Or, in some cases, that the employees weren’t even registered with a fund, even though deductions had come off their salaries. Her suspension is by no means suggesting a guilty verdict on the part of the CEO.

The board unanimously believes that it is in the best interest of the organisation to place the CEO on suspension to allow for an objective, independent and impartial investigation into the allegations.

“At the end of the day, the PPRA board needed to decide to hold the CEO accountable,” she says. “At this stage, the FSCA is investigating the employer’s non-compliance with the rules of the fund and the PFA, and the board of trustees is also undertaking its investigation,” he said.

Which, of course, is far from optimal.

Alexforbes Actuaries calculated that it owed R1.14 million to the fund in outstanding contributions and interest.

Why Mohlala-Mulaudzi’s non-compliance is a big deal

While this case deserves added scrutiny because the person accused of skipping pension fund contributions was herself the former adjudicator, this worrying trend in on the rise across the country.

The number of complaints to the PFA about precisely this is growing and, in many cases, retirement fund members themselves didn’t even know their contributions weren’t being paid – they simply assumed that it was being deducted from their salaries and being paid over.

Usually, it’s only when the PFA begins investigating wider complaints about pension benefits that it picks up that there have been partial payments, or none at all.

Yet Mohlala-Mulaudzi said this shouldn’t apply to the five employees since they found the retirement contributions “unaffordable”.

To some, that might seem like an open and shut case. But what Ngubeni’s PPRA board is trying to answer is whether Mohlala-Mulaudzi was “truly negligent”, whether she “ignored the law” and if her actions qualify as criminality.

Mohlala-Mulaudzi did not respond to requests for comment from Today’s Trustee.

Who protected Mohlala-Mulaudzi?

There are plenty of questions yet to be answered about this case, however.

Foremost of which is why it took the PPRA four months to suspend Mohlala-Mulaudzi after that PFA determination in November 2021.

The PPRA remains committed to the transformation agenda in the property sphere.

End.

Issued by the PPRA.  [ 2022-03-28 ]