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The Congress of South African Trade Unions welcomes the legal action that is to be taken by the board of South African Airways against its former CEO, Khaya Ngqula, who resigned in March 2009.

This is a great victory for the SA Transport and Allied Workers Union, whose members first blew the whistle on the CEO. Their allegations have now been confirmed by a forensic audit by KPMG.

The board is to take steps to recover R27-million that Ngqula allegedly caused to be spent on sign-on retention bonuses to employees of the company which exceeded the authority given to him, were over the maximum financial limit and were not authorised by the board."

The board will also seek to recover R3,3-million that Ngqula spent on hiring hospitality suites in various sports stadiums. He organised overseas trips for friends and associates to the 2006 Fifa World Cup, the Rugby World Cup in 2007 and an ATP tennis tournament in 2008.

The KPMG report also revealed that companies in which Ngqula and his wife had an interest obtained rights to a Sunshine Tour golf event, which became known as the Africa Open, and that he was involved in securing sponsorships for the event from a competing airline while still employed by SAA at a time when he was in the process of terminating SAA's sponsorship of the SA Open golf tournament.

When Ngqula was sacked in March 2009, SATAWU welcomed the decision, which it rightly claimed as "a victory that SATAWU and its members fully claim as part of our ongoing campaign for clean and good governance and accountability of senior executives".

"The payment of retention bonuses to 127 managers to the tune of almost R60-million over a three-year period," said the union, "was the kind of greed and self-enrichment that should never be repeated".

COSATU congratulates its affiliate and sends out a warning to any other executives that the trade unions will now be even more determined to follow SATAWU's example and to blow the whistle of such examples of crass materialism and theft from a state-owned asset.