SIU sent into North West bus company and contracts linked to Suliman Carrim
President Cyril Ramaphosa has signed Proclamation 348 of 2026, authorising the Special Investigating Unit to investigate North West Transport Investments, North West Star and the Atteridgeville Bus Service. The investigation covers fuel supply, a vehicle rental agreement, a subcontracted commuter bus service and claims paid to companies linked to Mahikeng businessman Suliman Carrim. It also covers the conduct of the business rescue practitioner appointed to NTI in July 2022. Nobody has been convicted of anything in this matter, and Ziggy Investments disputes the findings made against it in an earlier forensic report.
What the president signed
On 14 September 2026 the SIU announced that the president had signed Proclamation 348 of 2026, covering North West Transport Investments, or NTI, along with its wholly owned subsidiary North West Star and the Atteridgeville Bus Service.
SIU spokesperson Selby Makgotho said the president has directed the SIU to investigate the affairs of the NTI, its wholly owned subsidiary North West Star, and the Atteridgeville Bus Service, which is also a wholly owned subsidiary of North West Star.
The proclamation names 3 areas of procurement and contracting. The first is fuel supplied by Zentrafor Fuel, trading as FuelU. The second is a vehicle rental agreement dated 28 July 2023. The third is a subcontractor agreement dated 7 July 2023 for commuter bus services, together with the payments made under it.
Both of those agreements were signed a year after NTI went into business rescue.
The proclamation goes past the contracts themselves. It asks the SIU to examine how NTI received, processed, approved and paid claims submitted by Tansanat Coachlines, by Ziggy Investments and by the joint venture the 2 companies formed. Every one of those payments passed a person inside the state whose job was to check it before the money moved.
The company at the centre
Ziggy Investments is a close corporation. Suliman Carrim is its sole member.
According to News24, the tender at the centre of the investigation is a R168 million commuter transport contract awarded by the North West Department of Community Safety and Transport Management to a joint venture between Ziggy Investments and Tansanat Coachlines.
A combined summons filed in the North West High Court in Mahikeng in July 2025 confirms that Carrim represented Ziggy when the Ngaka Modiri Molema District Municipality received an earlier offer. The papers give the company’s address as 14 Main Street, Mahikeng.
The water contract
That district municipality hired Ziggy Investments to deliver drought relief water and sanitation, using trucks paid at a rate for every kilometre travelled. For a 14 or 16 kilolitre truck the rate was R16.80 a kilometre. For an 18 or 20 kilolitre truck it was R18.50. The company was required to invoice for the kilometres its trucks actually travelled.
The Auditor General flagged material irregularities in that contract. Forensic investigators, Maine-Mokhetle, were then brought in to go through it, and News24 reported on what they found in June 2026.
According to the investigators, the invoices claimed distances they could not verify against GPS coordinates or route calculations. They put the overclaim at R2.84 million between July 2018 and June 2019, and at R2.37 million between July 2019 and June 2020. The contract was then extended, and between July and December 2020 they put the overclaim at a further R1.51 million. The total they arrived at is R6 730 428.60.
2 full years of invoices had already passed through the municipality when the extension was signed.
What Ziggy Investments says
Ziggy Investments denies the findings. Through its attorneys, Zisiwe Attorneys, the company disputed the methodology of the investigation, arguing that delivering water in and around the surrounding villages is more intricate than calculating kilometres on Google Maps.
That is a serious answer. A water truck moving between scattered villages does not drive the line a mapping application draws between 2 points, and if the method used to calculate the overclaim is wrong, the figure is wrong with it.
There is a way to settle the argument that does not involve Google Maps at all. If the routes were longer than the map shows, trip sheets and vehicle tracking records would show it. A company billing by the kilometre would normally hold that record already, because the record is what the invoice is built from.
From water trucks to buses
Put the 2 contracts next to each other. Between 2018 and 2020, Ziggy Investments was a close corporation hiring out trucks to carry drought relief water to villages for a district municipality. By July 2023 it was part of a joint venture holding a R168 million commuter transport tender from the provincial department.
Nothing in the SIU statement, and nothing in the reporting so far, says what Ziggy brought to a bus contract or who decided it was the right company for one. It is also not clear whether the forensic findings on the water contract were known to the department before it signed. Those are questions for the North West Department of Community Safety and Transport Management.
The business rescue practitioner
NTI could not pay what it owed. On 21 July 2022 it went into business rescue and a practitioner was appointed to run it.
The proclamation asks the SIU to examine what that practitioner did, what their agents did and what NTI employees did, whether any person or company received an undue benefit, and whether this resulted in serious maladministration causing actual or potential losses to NTI or the state. The person put in to run the company is inside the scope of the investigation.
What the SIU can reach
On the same day, Ramaphosa amended Proclamation 226 of 2024, the one that authorised the SIU to investigate eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality’s procurement of security and VIP protection services. 2 years on, that scope had to be widened.
Proclamation 348 names a fuel supplier, an agreement dated 28 July 2023, an agreement dated 7 July 2023 and claims from 3 named companies. If the same conduct appears in a contract signed in 2024 or 2025, the SIU has to return to the president for another signature before it can follow it there.
Makgotho said the SIU will refer any evidence of criminal conduct to the National Prosecuting Authority, and that the unit is authorised to institute civil action in its own name, in the High Court or the Special Tribunal, to address wrongdoing arising from corruption, fraud or maladministration.
The conduct examined in the water contract ran from 2018 to 2020. The Auditor General flagged it, a forensic firm put a figure on it, and a summons was filed in July 2025, more than 4 years after the overclaiming stopped.
Carrim’s company is named in the proclamation, and so is the joint venture it is part of. What is not named anywhere in it is a single official who approved a single one of those payments. Somebody signed the extension in 2020 after 2 years of invoices had already gone through. Somebody signed the 2 agreements in July 2023. Those names exist, and the SIU now has the power to go and find them.
