In 2015, the South African Parliament voted for a support package worth more than R83 billion (approximately $6,77 billion) to the electricity utility, Eskom, a State Owned Enterprise (SOE). Was this based on a general policy or on executive discretion? This article considers this question. It does this by discussing the literature dealing with the policy versus the discretion issue, within the context of its definition of policy. The methodological approach for this is content analysis. It analyses official documents and parliamentary proceedings, including National Treasury resources and other relevant official sources of information within the government system. The intention is to look for evidence, in the records of parliamentary proceedings, that government actually based the subvention decisions on pre-existing general policy. Its finding is that the decision on the subvention to Eskom was not based on general policy, but main