The Witness reports that a Pietermaritzburg law firm has launched a class action lawsuit against Msunduzi Municipality, accusing the City of abandoning its former workers and leaving them to suffer for more than a decade without the pension payouts they earned in service.

The unpaid pension funds in question were managed by the Pietermaritzburg Corporation Provident Fund, which was outsourced and has since been liquidated. The pensioners have been pleading for their benefits since 2012. Attorney Primi Chetty said the municipality has ignored every attempt to resolve the matter amicably. Central to the dispute is a forensic investigation commissioned years ago to determine what happened to the pension funds.

The report on the investigation, according to Chetty, “never saw the light of day”, and the law firm lodged a PAIA application last Friday to force the municipality to release it. “We want to know what happened to that report, and why it was hidden. Our first target is to obtain that document and understand how this crisis was allowed to unfold,” Chetty indicated. She said that the municipality passed a council resolution in 2019 instructing that the pensioners be paid while the investigation continued, but that decision was never implemented. When the pensioners first raised the alarm, the outstanding amount was around R33 million. With more than a decade of interest and inflation, the figure is now believed to have ballooned to about R100 million.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Chris Ndaliso at The Witness

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