Eskom says its attempts to clean up procurement are going well – and claiming scalps.

After hundreds of lifestyle audits the details for more than 40 employees have been sent to the Special Investigating Unit.

And with more than a thousand disciplinary cases around procurement concluded, well over a hundred employees are now former.

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Eskom has referred scores of its employees to the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) after a major lifestyle audit operation.

The troubled company had conducted lifestyle audits on 365 "senior employees", just-appointed CEO Jabu Mabuza disclosed in a statement in the Eskom annual report released on Tuesday afternoon.

Mabuza has just been appointed the temporary CEO of Eskom, but was writing in his position as chairperson.

Of those investigations, "approximately 12% are considered high risk cases, and have been handed over" to the SIU, Mabuza said.

That is some 44 cases.

"As investigations are completed, consideration is given to legal remedies, including the possible pursuit of civil and criminal proceedings," Eskom said elsewhere in its annual report.

At other levels of the company too there were large-scale investigations – which apparently uncovered even larger-scale wrongdoing.

In a report on its cleanup operations, Eskom says that by March this year it had concluded just over a thousand outstanding disciplinary cases "relating to procurement breaches" – all of which had been "unattended" at the beginning of the financial year in April 2018.

"This process has culminated in a total of 116 employee exits," the company said, without providing more details on the nature of those exits.

In another process, Eskom says it identified 25 employees who had "business interests in suppliers doing business with Eskom". Of those seven left the company, and Eskom said the rest had relinquished their business interests.

Eskom reported more than R1.3 billion in new irregular expenditure for the financial year, bringing its current total to R6.6 billion.