Cape Town — What drew the Lesotho authorities' attention to Masupha Ephraim Sole was his "flashy" lifestyle, in particular his love for fast cars and expensive houses, according to sources.

Sole, who was charged yesterday with taking R12m in bribes from a dozen international companies, was appointed the first CEO of the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority in October 1986.

The job of the authority is to manage the R10bn international project - overseen by the SA and Lesotho governments - to take water to Gauteng from Lesotho.

A civil engineer by trade, Sole headed the project for nine years until his dismissal in October 1995 following an internal disciplinary hearing.

According to yesterday's charge sheet, Sole - whose age is given as "about" 51 - accepted bribes over a 10-year period, three of which were after his dismissal.

The internal inquiry was conducted only after Sole was first suspended in December 1994. He was subsequently found guilty on several charges of misconduct after "irregularities in the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority were increasingly being connected to him", according to a source close to the investigation.

Sole unsuccessfully applied to the courts to have the findings and his dismissal set aside.

It was then that the development authority first turned to the courts and brought a civil case against him for an amount of R9m - described as "an income over and above his legitimate remuneration". The R12m involved in the alleged bribery case is "a separate issue".

Sole opposed the civil action and, according to documents in the possession of Business Day, "showed an extreme reluctance to allow his employer access to his bank accounts". He also denied "under oath" that he had any bank accounts outside Lesotho.

However, the development authority eventually succeeded in gaining access to his bank accounts in Maseru, which allegedly led to the discovery of accounts in SA and Switzerland. Judgment in the four-year-old civil case is pending.

"In the course of the review of his bank accounts, certain payments were identified which raised serious questions about his activities while he was CEO," one source said.

"These transactions, when followed back to their source in Switzerland and France, pointed to direct payments from the contractors concerned," he said.

The criminal charges, he said, had less to do with the award of contracts than with Sole using his position to take decisions on his own on, some of them involving valuable contracts.

According to one of the charges, Sole undertook an unauthorised visit to Paris in June-July 1991 where he allegedly discussed details of various claims with some of the companies.

On his return to Maseru, according to the charge sheet, Sole fraudulently submitted an expenses claim for attending an "international conference on large dams" in Vienna, Austria, on behalf of the authority.