The Industrial Development Cooperation (IDC) says it is processing 106 million applications for funding from its special Covid-19 relief fund.

While this number may be close to double the official South African population, its CEO Tshokolo Petrus Nchocho said the number was initially close to 1 billion, before it refused some claims for failing to meet the funding criteria.

Nchocho was addressing members of parliament during a joint meeting on trade and industry on Wednesday afternoon.

“In terms of the applications that are still outstanding ... we have in aggregate, under this emergency scheme, 160 million applications that are in assessment. They are being evaluated,” he said.

“Unfortunately at times when these programmes are being opened up, some of the applications are not relevant and they don’t meet the qualifications of the scheme. We did receive a long substantial list, I think running in excess of a billion."

He said they had to process the whole list of applications.

The IDC is one of the government entities providing funding to distressed businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has forced a crippling lockdown.

Nchocho said it had approved a total of R733m in the past month through various initiatives.

“[At total of] R379m has been approved for emergency Covid-19 funding. but not all of it has been disbursed now. About only R130m has been paid out,” he said.

He said the rest of the approved amount has not been disbursed because of their own admin work, which includes clearances in relation to the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC).

Asked about the requirements, Nchoncho said on a day-to-day basis they do not discriminate against businesses that do not have BBBEE cridentials.

“We actively go out and try to promote transformation transactions and try and bank those. However, we do support all industrial enterprises in this country,” he said, adding that the IDC pushes transformation because it is mandated to do so.