In July 2015, the V&A Waterfront offered a chief information officer R700 000 a year. She answered with a counter-offer of R1.1 million, backed by a letter from a university that a witness later called a “complete fabrication”. The V&A raised its offer to R850 000. This month the Labour Court in Cape Town ordered her to pay the company about R2.9 million in damages, in a case that ITWeb says dates back almost a decade, The Citizen reported on 19 September and ITWeb followed on 29 September.
The judgment itself was not available to us at the time of writing, so this account rests on those two reports of it. What they describe is a practical checklist for any owner who hires senior people or lets a manager choose suppliers.
What the court found about the CV
The V&A employed Sibongiseni Thotsejane as chief information officer from 12 October 2015 and dismissed her summarily for misconduct after a disciplinary enquiry on 12 December 2016. The company then sued, and Judge Robert Lagrange found she had fraudulently induced it to employ her. According to The Citizen’s account of the evidence, her CV said she left Engen over “political challenges” and a merger, when she had been dismissed for gross misconduct. It said she left Old Mutual because she was headhunted, when she had been dismissed after a disciplinary inquiry. It said she resigned from Acceleration eMarketing for career development, when she had been dismissed for incapacity.
She also concealed that she was still employed at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), where the evidence showed she kept drawing her full salary until February 2017. The counter-offer that lifted her pay from R700 000 to R850 000 rested on a fabricated CPUT job offer. “Had the applicant known the true version of her prior employment history, it would never have employed her,” the judgment says, as quoted by ITWeb. Thotsejane represented herself for much of the trial and, ITWeb reported, repeatedly failed to appear in court.
The consultants, and the conflict nobody was told about
The second finding concerns procurement. The V&A’s outsourced IT provider, EOH MC Solutions, placed two consultants at the company. The court found Thotsejane promoted both appointments without telling her employer that both consultants had previously worked through her own private company. “What exacerbated the situation was that she did not disclose her connection to persons she was encouraging EOH to engage,” Judge Lagrange wrote, “thereby concealing from the employer that she was not a disinterested party in the appointment process.”
The V&A paid EOH R1 402 005 and R464 000, excluding VAT, for the two consultants, and the judge found they “failed to even render the services they had been engaged to perform”. ITWeb notes the judgment does not address whether EOH itself was complicit, because EOH was not a party to the case.
What was ordered
Judge Lagrange ordered Thotsejane to pay R1 031 237 for the misrepresentations that led to her employment, R1 402 005 and R464 000 for the consultants’ fees, interest on all three, and the V&A’s legal costs on an attorney-and-own-client scale. That scale typically covers more of the winning side’s legal bills than the ordinary one.
What it means for an owner who hires
The first lesson is that the lies were checkable. The Citizen’s account says the lies surfaced through enquiries to a former employer and through the records of earlier dismissals. Phone calls to previous employers, before an offer rather than after a dismissal, are the cheapest control in the story. The second is that a contract should make the candidate declare every other job and business interest, because the CPUT salary carried on for more than a year of overlap. Our HR and Labour Relations Document Generator produces employment contracts and disciplinary notices as a starting point, and any final version should be checked by an attorney or labour consultant.
The third lesson is about procurement. The V&A’s own procurement policy required employees to act honestly, keep relationships at arm’s length and avoid conflicts of interest, ITWeb reported. The gap was that the person steering suppliers was the person with the undisclosed link. A simple rule, that anyone who recommends a supplier or contractor signs a declaration of interests first, closes that gap for a business of any size.
What a judgment does not give you
An order is not money in the bank. The V&A dismissed its CIO in December 2016, brought its action in 2018, and ITWeb reports the case was postponed and re-enrolled repeatedly from 2022. Nothing in the reporting says how much, if any, of the R2.9 million has been recovered. For a small business, the arithmetic points the same way as the checklist: a few phone calls and a signed declaration cost almost nothing, and eight years between filing and judgment costs a great deal.
