Corporate & Business · NPO & Social Impact · Commercial Disputes & Recovery
Nine separate disputes, one claim the supplier’s board could not route back to an account manager
Contract pricing, installation, equipment quantities, physical infrastructure, service performance, network capacity and recurring billing were all contested at once. KuTh reconstructed the position across fifteen operating sites and 774 pages of evidence, then escalated it through account, technical, commercial and senior-management channels to a CEO-level submission.
- R23.4M
- contractual claim submitted
- 15
- operating sites verified
- 9
- independently stated claim areas
- 3,534
- supplier fault tickets analysed
Proof context: A distributed multi-site care environment
The situation
The problem was not one billing query — it was nine at once
A long-running enterprise ICT relationship supported a distributed care environment: voice services, PBX equipment, wide-area connectivity, MetroLAN, hosted services, switches, wireless access points, cabinets, UPS equipment and cabling. By the time KuTh was retained, contract formation, pricing, installation delay, equipment quantity, equipment specification, installation quality, fault clearance, line performance, duplicated services, backup functionality and billing were all contested simultaneously.
A dispute in that state cannot be resolved by looking at the latest invoice. Commercial and technical decisions had accumulated since 2015, while installation and billing events happened later. The investigation had to separate the date a term was accepted from the date equipment was delivered, the date a service went live, and the period over which it was billed.
What KuTh did
Reconstruct the whole relationship, not the contested invoice
KuTh was retained on 1 November 2020. Over ten months the work became an integrated dispute-reconstruction exercise, with twelve contributors recorded across commercial, telecommunications, network, fibre, PBX, Wi-Fi, electrical and systems disciplines.
- Rebuilt the contract spine. Accepted quotations, addenda, SLAs, requests-for-order, acceptance certificates and change requests were reassembled to establish which document governed each disputed charge.
- Verified fifteen sites physically. A joint survey programme between 26 April and 5 May 2021 checked equipment presence, serviceability, specification and installation quality against the supplier’s asset register.
- Analysed the fault record. 3,534 supplier fault tickets spanning March 2019 to March 2021 were examined for cause code, elapsed resolution time, repeat incidents and whether the closing action matched the recorded cause.
- Reconstructed the billing. A side-by-side schedule set current billing against a corrected quantity and pricing comparator, while a separate interim-payment position kept essential services running without conceding the dispute.
- Escalated on a documented ledger. Account management, technical and commercial teams, a supplier panel presentation, Managing Executive and senior-management escalation, then COO-level engagement — each with an owner, a promise and a next escalation point.
The result
Nine claim areas, each independently stated
Scroll table sideways →
| Claim area | Amount | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 5. SLA failures and uncredited service | R12,929,514.31 | 55.2% |
| 1. Pricing reconstruction | R3,953,351.16 | 16.9% |
| 9. Interest model | R2,080,648.65 | 8.9% |
| 7. Incorrect equipment / refund | R1,331,573.04 | 5.7% |
| 2. Invoice vs delivered quantity | R1,019,276.28 | 4.4% |
| 8. MetroLAN upgrade / refund | R858,742.15 | 3.7% |
| 4. On-site vs working equipment | R593,095.68 | 2.5% |
| 3. Delivered vs on-site equipment | R453,833.28 | 1.9% |
| 6. Duplicated services | R183,261.47 | 0.8% |
| Total submitted | R23,403,296.02 | 100.0% |
Shown largest first; the source numbering is retained. Each area rests on a separate contractual, physical, performance or billing basis, with its own calculation, so any one component can be reviewed or conceded without collapsing the rest. The nine areas sum exactly to the submitted total.
Why it held together
Each layer was built so it could not double-count the last
The first four areas are deliberately sequenced. Area 1 isolates the price effect against accepted 2015 pricing at equal quantities. Area 2 then isolates the quantity effect, after the price effect has already been taken. Area 3 moves from documentary delivery to what was physically found on site. Area 4 separates equipment that was present from equipment actually working and in use.
That ordering is what allows nine mechanisms to be added together. Presence was never treated as proof of value, and a recurring fault code was never treated as an unquestioned fact — where the same failure appeared across many locations, the investigation tested whether the shared cause was design, installation, maintenance, environment, equipment generation or supplier process.
Evidence and publication boundary
This documents a claim that was submitted, not a settlement that was reached. On 13 September 2021 a consolidated R23.4 million contractual claim was submitted at CEO level, supported by a 123-page report and 651 pages of annexures. The source record does not contain a settlement agreement, an award or evidence of recovery, so no amount here is described as recovered, awarded or agreed.
Client and supplier identities, site addresses, individual names and unit rates are withheld. The engagement ran in 2020–2021 under the law and regulations then in force; ICASA’s End-User and Subscriber Service Charter regime has since been amended, and current procedure should not be applied retrospectively to the analysis of that dispute.
Supporting documents