A former senior accountant at Vodacom has stated under oath the group lied when claiming it did not have key documents to work out the revenue generated from the Please Call Me (PCM) concept.

A Cape Times report says Teboho Motaung, who joined Vodacom in 1995 and left as a senior accountant in 2017, detailed in an affidavit that Vodacom actually undertook an accounting exercise to look into revenue streams linked to PCM.

The affidavit has been deposed to the court due to hear another legal bout between Vodacom and PCM inventor Nkosana Makate.

In the upcoming court battle, Vodacom will bring a variation application before Judge Jody Kollapen at the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria).

Vodacom wanted Kollapen to amend his June ruling ordering the company to give Makate key documents detailing financial and contractual data spanning 18 years.

Makate needed these documents to prove that Vodacom owed him more than the R47m they offered for his invention. The former Vodacom accountant sought R20bn.

Motaung said he observed with shock how Vodacom executives repeatedly told courts, including the Constitutional Court, that there were no full records to work out revenue generated from PCM.

According to the Cape Times report, Motaung said: ‘I was personally requested by Mrs Hannelie Patterson, who had been my previous immediate supervisor at Vodacom, to give her guidance as to where certain aspects of revenue earned by PCM could be recorded and calculated. The instruction was simply to investigate, identify and calculate the revenue streams from various ledgers showing sources of income related to PCM as returned calls on PCM SMSes, all of which are derived from dedicated ledgers. The instruction went further and required the staff to go back as far as possible with the investigation and calculation.’

He said this exercise, which saw ‘a number of personnel placed under pressure to provide the information as expeditiously and fully as possible’, lasted for two to three weeks. Motaung said he learnt from the group’s SAP system that possible figures had been worked out.

‘I was profoundly shocked by what I discovered.’

Full Cape Times report