City Power has admitted that a power outage during Jacques Pauw's "The President's Keepers" book launch was out of the ordinary.
The electricity supplier's Sol Masolo said generators at the Hyde Park Corner mall, where the event was held, are expected to kick in immediately after a power outage in the area.
"It is out of the ordinary. When you have a power outage on our side, their generators would kick in. It is a bit odd from that point of view," Masolo said.
He had just come out of a meeting with the centre's management before speaking to the HuffPost SA on Thursday.
"We are still investigating what caused the problem... Our engineer and their engineer will meet. We will continue monitoring power supply to the mall until the investigation concludes," Masolo said.
"We agreed that we will put a joint team of technical people together with the purpose of investigating the cause of the outage. The fault was both on our side and their [Hyde Park Corner's] side. The team will also find a lasting solution and implement it."
Masolo said the investigation should be concluded in a week, after which another meeting will be held.
Exclusive Books also said it is investigating the circumstances around the power outage. The bookstore's CEO Benjamin Trisk did not know whether the outage was caused by an electric fault or an "unseen hand", but said that the turnout to the launch was nevertheless "astonishing".
NB Publishers CEO Eloise Wessels said the power outage seemed like too much of a coincidence in view of the threats to Pauw and the publishing company.
Pauw's book reveals several scandals involving President Jacob Zuma and his cronies, and claims, among other things, that a top-secret state-intelligence programme had allegedly guzzled as much as R1-billion of taxpayers' money in just three years, and that intelligence operatives were used to get Zuma off the hook on 783 counts of fraud, corruption and racketeering.