JohannesburgLucky Montana, ex-head of South Africa’s Passenger Rail Agency, received R685,000 from a train-deal accounting firm.
Tax records show the firm funnelled R32m from the locomotives deal, with the South African Revenue Service finding the payments undeclared.
Montana calls them bridging loans and is contesting the tax assessment.
Sources: Daily Maverick
THE TALL TRAINS
PRASA's signature scandal is literal: in 2013 the agency ordered 70 Spanish-built Afro 4000 locomotives that turned out to be too tall for South Africa's overhead electrification. Engineers flagged the clearance problem before delivery. The trains arrived anyway, sat in depots, and became permanent shorthand for procurement gone wrong.
STATE CAPTURE
PRASA's looting was one node in a wider pattern the Zondo Commission later mapped: under President Jacob Zuma (2009–2018), state-owned enterprises were turned into vehicles for organised extraction. Eskom (power), Transnet (freight), SAA (airline), Denel (arms), and PRASA were the largest stages. The losses ran into the hundreds of billions of rand and gutted the country's growth rate for a decade.
THE PROFESSIONAL ENABLERS
Grand corruption rarely moves through suitcases of cash. It moves through accounting firms, law firms, and consultancies that issue invoices, write opinions, and route funds. Bain, McKinsey, KPMG, and SAP all faced sanctions or settlements over their South African work. The Daily Maverick's Scorpio unit and amaBhungane built much of the public record by tracing exactly the kind of firm-to-individual transfer Montana is now contesting.
SARS AS THE LAST LINE
The South African Revenue Service was once the country's most respected institution — a rare post-apartheid build that genuinely worked. Under Zuma it was deliberately hollowed: senior investigators forced out, the high-net-worth unit dissolved, billions in revenue lost. Commissioner Edward Kieswetter's rebuild after 2019 restored investigative capacity, which is why a 2015-era payment is only now surfacing in a 2026 tax assessment.
THE BRIDGING-LOAN DEFENCE
Calling an undeclared transfer a loan is the oldest tax-evasion defence in the book: loans are not income, so they are not taxed. The burden then flips onto the recipient to produce a loan agreement, a repayment schedule, and evidence of repayment. SARS routinely reclassifies these as disguised income when those documents are absent or backdated — which is the assessment Montana is now contesting.