PAIA Manual

Acronyms used on this page

PAIA — Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000. POPIA — Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013. IO — Information Officer. The Regulator — South Africa's Information Regulator, which oversees both Acts.

Purpose of this manual

This manual exists so anyone — a Tradeora user or otherwise — can see, in one place, what kinds of records Vahlave Quick Tech Solutions holds in connection with Tradeora, and how to formally request access to a record under PAIA. It doesn't replace our Privacy Policy, which explains how we use personal information day to day — this page is specifically about the formal request-for-access process PAIA provides.

Contact details

Vahlave Quick Tech Solutions
Information Officer: the head of Vahlave Quick Tech Solutions (registration with the Information Regulator in progress)
Email: info@tradeora.co.za
Based in Gauteng, South Africa

Send a PAIA request, or any question about this manual, to the email address above.

Guide on how to use PAIA

The Information Regulator publishes an official guide explaining how PAIA works and how to submit a request, available in several languages. See inforegulator.org.za, or the Department of Justice's own PAIA guide and FAQ.

Records available without a formal request

The records below are already public on the site — no PAIA request is needed for these: the Tradeora homepage, category listings, approved supplier profiles, published product/service listings, the open RFQ board, our Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Cookie Policy, and this manual itself.

Categories of records we hold

In connection with operating Tradeora, Vahlave Quick Tech Solutions holds records in roughly these categories — see our Privacy Policy for the full detail on each:

• Account & profile records — user accounts, business/individual profiles, verification documents submitted for admin review.
• Marketplace activity records — RFQs, quotes, orders, reviews, messages between users, disputes raised.
• Communications — emails sent to or received from users (account confirmations, password resets, support correspondence).
• Technical & analytics records — page-view and traffic-source analytics, cookie consent choices (see our Cookie Policy).
• Business & financial records — Vahlave Quick Tech Solutions's own accounting, tax, and company registration records, held under standard South African record-keeping law rather than anything specific to Tradeora.

Records available under other legislation

Some records — company registration and tax records, for example — are created and kept under other South African legislation (the Companies Act, tax legislation, and similar) rather than under PAIA itself, and access to them may be governed by those Acts instead.

How personal information is processed

For the purposes POPIA requires us to disclose here — why we process personal information, whose information, who we share it with, and the safeguards in place — see our Privacy Policy in full; it covers this in more depth than would be useful to duplicate on this page.

How to make a PAIA request

Complete the Regulator's prescribed request form ("Form 2," available from inforegulator.org.za) and send it to info@tradeora.co.za, describing the record(s) you're requesting and how you'd like to receive them.

Current statutory fees (private body): a R140 request fee, plus a R1.50 per-page reproduction fee if you ask for photocopies. We'll tell you the total before processing your request.

We're required to respond within 30 calendar days of a valid request (a single further 30-day extension is allowed in some circumstances, and we'll tell you if that applies). If a request is refused, we'll give you the reason and how to take it further with the Regulator.

Grounds for refusal

PAIA allows a request to be refused on specific, limited grounds — most relevantly here, protecting another person's privacy, legally privileged material, or genuinely confidential commercial information belonging to a business on the platform. Any refusal will name the specific ground relied on, as PAIA requires.