The Democratic Alliance (DA) has filed a complaint with the Independent Regulatory Board for Auditors (IRBA) against the auditors of South African Airways, DA deputy finance spokesperson Alf Lees said on Monday.

Lees said the opposition was asking the IRBA to consider the failure on the part of SAA’s auditors to qualify the going concern status in the embattled carrier’s financial statements.

“The SAA auditors failed to qualify the “going concern” assumption contained in the SAA annual financial statements despite a SAA Treasury memo dated the 23/08/2016 to the SAA directors that stated that the proposed R4.7-billion government guarantee would not be sufficient to ensure that SAA was able to continue trading until the end of the 2016/17 financial year.”

“Clearly if this were the case the going concern’ assumption made by the SAA directors was not appropriate, i.e. SAA will not be able to continue trading for a period of 12 months from the date of the SAA directors approval, being the 18/09/2016. This memo was dated some 37 days before the auditors signed their audit reports.”

He added that the auditors failed to justify the basis for accepting the assumption of going concern status put forward by SAA’s directors and questioned whether this meant that SAA chairperson Dudu Myeni misled the new board members who took up their posts 17 days before signing the financial statements for 2014/15 and 2015/15.

SAA suffered losses of R5.6-billion in 2014/15.