Punitive Cost Order Against Dodgy Lottery Official Nompumelelo Nene

Nompumelelo Nene earned nearly R6-million while on suspension.

• Nompumelelo Nene served as the company secretary for the National Lotteries Commission (NLC).
• After an Auditor-General report highlighted irregularities under her watch, the NLC suspended her in November 2022, charging her with 145 counts of misconduct.
• She resigned in January 2025, before facing her disciplinary hearing.
• She took the NLC to court but lost last year, when Judge Stuart Wilson in the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg made a punitive cost order against her.
• On 4 September, Judge Jan Swanepoel in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria handed down a punitive cost order against Nene.

National Lotteries Commission (NLC) company secretary Nompumelelo Nene has finally thrown in the towel in her ongoing legal battles against those who wanted to hold her accountable for her role in plundering NLC funds. Nene resigned while on suspension and facing disciplinary proceedings.

But it has come at a cost. In at least two of her many failed court applications, she has been ordered to pay the costs, on a punitive scale, from her own pocket.

Last year, Johannesburg High Court Judge Stuart Wilson, in dismissing her urgent application to halt the disciplinary proceedings – in which she was facing 145 charges – said it was a hopeless case.

He said she should have known better as an admitted advocate and senior corporate lawyer. For this reason, he ordered that she pay the punitive costs personally.

This month, Pretoria High Court Judge Jan Swanepoel expressed similar sentiments.

The matter before him involved an attempt by Nene to review and set aside a report by the Auditor-General, which highlighted the alleged irregularities committed under her watch.

Detailing the history of the matter, Judge Swanepoel said although the Auditor-General’s report did not “impugn her personally”, on Nene’s version she was accused by the NLC of having deviated from its procurement procedures and had been suspended from her position.

She had then been charged with 145 counts of misconduct.

She launched the review application and the urgent application to halt the disciplinary hearing on the same day.

Judge Swanepoel said the review was “cast in broad terms” but in essence she had sought an order that the NLC had not committed any irregular expenditure.

After being suspended in November 2022, in January 2025 she resigned from the NLC, avoiding having to answer for her actions at the disciplinary proceedings.

That same month, the Auditor-General’s attorney sought clarity about whether or not Nene intended to proceed with the review application. A further inquiry was made in February. Nene’s attorneys responded that they had no instructions from her.

As a result, the Auditor-General and other respondents, including the NLC, filed their opposing affidavits.

In April, Nene suddenly withdrew the review application. But she made no offer to pay the costs.

The issue landed on the desk of the Deputy Judge President who directed that a hearing be held to determine the costs issue.

Judge Swanepoel said Nene opposed this application but did not file an affidavit. Then, just before midnight on the eve of the application, Nene withdrew her opposition but on condition that the Auditor-General could not demand costs from her, but should rather claim these from an insurer which, she claimed, indemnified employees of the NLC.

The Auditor-General and the NLC then launched proceedings asking for an order that she pay punitive costs personally.

Judge Swanepoel said such cost orders were not granted lightly and usually only when there had been a clear “abuse of process”.

“Courts are slow to punish a litigant who seeks a determination by a court of a complaint that he or she may have,” he said.

The Auditor-General and the NLC had submitted that Nene had only launched the review application to justify a postponement of the disciplinary proceedings and “their suspicions were fortified by her subsequent conduct”.

Judge Swanepoel said her silence on whether she intended to proceed with the application meant that the Auditor-General and NLC had been forced to incur unnecessary costs to file answering affidavits and ultimately argue the case (on costs), resulting in further cost implications.

“In light of [Nene’s] conduct, her abuse of the processes of court and the fact that there was no merit whatsoever in her review application, I believe it would be appropriate to grant punitive costs,” he said.

Regarding her insistence that they should claim the costs from an insurance company, he said there was no basis for this.

“If [Nene] is able to secure an indemnification from the insurer, that is to her benefit, but the Auditor-General and the NLC are entitled to pursue them personally from her,” he said.

GroundUp previously reported that Nene had been paid almost R6-million during her two-year suspension. She was accused of orchestrating the deletion of grant beneficiary records from the NLC’s system, resulting in key documents being destroyed to cover up corruption in multi-million-rand lottery-funded projects.

In a statement, issued in March, Nene denied any wrongdoing and said her resignation was an “involuntary decision” brought about by prolonged pressure on her and her resources. She said the allegations about her were “wholly unsubstantiated”.

See GroundUp’s reports on Nene.

© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.