Stephen van Coller on righting the wrongs of EOH’s past

EOH chief executive Stephen van Coller joins BizNews founder Alec Hogg on the BizNews Power Hour on the day of another setback for the once high flying darling of the local bourse. EOH has been plagued by legacy issues, following years of fraud and corruption. Van Coller, who is adamant to save an under fire business, is a well-respected level-headed corporate executive with previous stints in banking and telecommunications. Although it has been and will continue to be a long-winded process, Van Coller says that saving jobs and a good underlying business is of utmost importance. – Justin Rowe-Roberts 

Stephen van Coller on today’s headlines (EOH being blacklisted by government):

I think the headlines are a bit exaggerated. We’ve been through this process with many of our customers, many of our partners, all the financial institutions and regulators. In 2019, they said to us – ‘come and present to us and show us why we should use EOH’. They gave us that opportunity cause they wanted to know what the issues were. All of them said to us – do you know what went wrong, do you actually know? What have you done to remedy that so that you can prevent it as much as possible in the future. Have you dealt with the perpetrators and people that were in positions of power, who knew what was going on but did nothing because that is just as complicit. And lastly, have you instituted action to put your money where your mouth is and see what you can get back what was stolen. Those are the kinda things you have to do. And we’ve largely done that.

On the significance of the SITA blacklisting: 

It’s quite interesting that our share price is only down 4%. If people really believed what was in the press, it should be down 90%. The point is we do have recourse, there are policies and procedures. The reason why National Treasury have this process is because a company has a number of employees, at the moment we have 6,500 employees. Just because a few people five years ago were corrupt, doesn’t mean all 6,500 people are corrupt. It’s like saying, because we have one or two bad ministers, the whole of government is corrupt. It’s like saying, if we have one or two bad political leaders, the whole political party is corrupt – it’s not true. What disappoints me I suppose is that it’s almost as if EOH is an easy target to go after as a legal entity because I still haven’t seen SITA banning any companies that the perpetrators were involved in or asking the perpetrators to come and give them a representation on why SITA shouldn’t blacklist them from doing work with government. Ditto the banks, ditto the JSE – I’m not sure what they doing, but I haven’t seen any of them coming out as boldly as we have to show that we are serious about doing the right business with the right people in the right way.

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