The Pretoria High Court is being asked to force the National Lotteries Board to honour a R20.4-million grant it withdrew barely a month after awarding it.

According to a press release by law firm Adams and Adams yesterday, papers have been lodged demanding the setting aside of the decision to withdraw the grant made to the Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy.

Molteno CEO Masennya Dikotla claims that it was awarded the grant on June 10.

The money was for a project that would have resulted in the provision of 500 mobile libraries, stocked with a total of 250000 books, to areas that did not have library facilities, he said.

However, the term of office of the distributing agency that approved the grant ended on July 9.

Dikotla said Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies authorised members of the National Lotteries Board to act as an interim distributing agency while a new distribution agency was found.

Molteno was informed that its grant had been withdrawn "due to the current budget constraints of the National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund, projects of this magnitude and extent cannot be funded".

He said requests for information made in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act had been ignored.

Dikotla said he doubted that there were budgetary constraints.

"We seriously doubt the truth of this as the award was made and withdrawn in the space of a couple of months within the same financial year.

"We are also particularly suspicious considering the Supreme Court judgment of September 2011 that stated that the National Lottery had underspent by R6-billion [in 2009]."

Documents Molteno submitted to the court show that the trust fund had more than R2-billion at the end of March 2011 that had not been distributed.

Molteno's lawyer, Jac Marais, said that, according to the National Lotteries Act, Davies could reverse the awarding of grants only in exceptional circumstances, such as illegal activities. In Molteno's case, such circumstances did not apply.

"We suspect that there are other NGOs whose grants may also have been illegally withdrawn," said Marais.

Board spokesman Sershan Naidoo would not comment on Molteno's court action other than to say that "we are studying Molteno's [court] papers and we will respond directly to them".

Last month, 400 members of various non-profit organisations staged a protest outside the board's offices demanding that it face a forensic audit and that board members be subjected to a lifestyle audit.