New light on email spying saga

The so-called email spying saga at Namibia Wildlife Resorts (NWR) has deepened, with the dismissed employees now claiming that they had in fact been mandated by the previous board to do an investigation. Reports surfaced this week that NWR had dismissed its Business Operation Manager, Diana Mugavari and Senior Manager of Internal Audit and Risk Compliance, Jermia Shangadi, after finding them guilty of misconduct. The former employees of NWR yesterday denied claims that they were spying by accessing the email accounts of other senior managers and leaking confidential information to the media and other institutions. Current Managing Director Zelna Hengari’s emails were apparently accessed 171 times. According to the employees they were conducting an investigation to find the source of the leak at the company. A report that the two yesterday shared with the media, which was apparently handed over to the previous board as well as independent lawyers, points to Hengari as one of the culprits who illegally shared company information with outsiders. At that stage she was the company secretary. “There was no spying of anyone’s email. I was an auditor and we were mandated to look at what was happening at the company and who was leaking information,” said Shangadi. He said one of the weak spots that they identified was the email system. According to him a report on their investigations was handed over to the board and independent lawyers and disciplinary charges were brought against the guilty parties. “We do not know what happened to these charges.” According to this report an analysis of the email system found that NWR information had been sent to recipients outside NWR. “From the analysis it is clear that there is a huge amount of sensitive and critical information in the public domain - information regarding board operations, pending cases between NWR and others, information between the board and the shareholder proxy and also internal audit work,” the report states. It found that the office of the company secretary, Hengari, had distributed NWR information illegally to unauthorised people and that was on record. Hengari was appointed as MD in January 2013 and on February 21 they were suspended. There were certain things that happened before the suspension, said Shangadi. “We started losing information about our investigation and on February 20 we wrote an email to the board and the IT manager regarding this. The next day we were suspended.“We did our investigation as normal. What happened between this board and the new board, we do not know.” Mugavari added that their disciplinary hearing was never concluded and they were still going to present witnesses and evidence. “We are definitely going to appeal this decision, but through our lawyers.” WINDHOEK ELLANIE SMIT