Johannesburg - The Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (Cipro) website will only be available intermittently until technical problems with a corrupted server have been resolved.
Cipro spokesperson Elsabe Conradie confirmed this in a statement which acknowledged that Cipro's infrastructure and systems have been causing "major frustration" for customers since December 2009.
A solution was found and the website was stabilised until two weekends ago, when the network system was upgraded.
"Unfortunately the upgrade took longer than anticipated and the Cipro website was only active on the following Wednesday.
"Since then Cipro again experienced downtimes and a team of experts consisting of staff members from the department of trade and industry, Cipro and an independent service provider were deployed to investigate the probable cause of the problem.
"It was discovered that one of the servers serving external customers was corrupted.
"Further investigation is continuing to determine what caused the failure of the server and finding a suitable solution," said Conradie. She acknowledged that Cipro's current infrastructure and systems are causing major frustrations to customers.
These difficulties coincide with controversy surrounding politicians and their business interests, all of which are all supposed to be registered with Cipro and up to date on its system.
The technical problems also coincide with Cipro's chief information technology officer, Michael Twum-Darko, being put on special leave following allegations of fraud in an IT contract with ValorIT worth R153m.
Cipro has objected to media reports that its CEO, Keith Sendwe, was also suspended.
According to Conradie, Sendwe has been on sick leave which is in no way connected to the fraud allegations.
Deadline postponed
Meanwhile, due to the website difficulties, Cipro says that the deregistration process for non-compliance to the submission of annual returns has been postponed until the end of April 2010, for both companies and close corporations.
Penalties for late payment will also be waived for February and March 2010.
Additional resources have also been made available to assist walk-in customers lodging annual returns.
- Fin24.com
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