Star 2023-04-05

THE circus at South Africa’s state-owned power utility, Eskom, continues as the National Treasury announced it would exempt the company from reporting on irregular and wasteful expenditure for a three-year period. This comes as the nation finds itself in the worst energy crisis in history, as an over-indebted Eskom imposes rolling power cuts every day this year so far. Through a Government Gazette on Friday, the Treasury exempted Eskom from section 55(2)(b)(i) of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) and Treasury Regulation 28.2.1 for a period of three years. Under these exemptions, Eskom is no longer required to disclose financial information related to irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure in its financial statements. The Treasury said this was done primarily to protect Eskom’s credit rating and audit opinion, which could have…

The transaction is expected to conclude in the final quarter of this year, with £100bn in funds Investec Group plans to merge its UK-based Investec Wealth & Investment UK with UK-listed Rathbones Group in an all share deal valued at £839 million (R18.5 billion) to create the UK’s leading discretionary wealth manager. Investec will be a minority shareholder in the enlarged Rathbones entity, with 41.25% stake and 29.9% voting rights, Investec said in a statement yesterday. Dealmakers International chief executive Andrew Bahlman said mergers and acquisitions such as between Rathbones buying Investec UK wealth unit have been a strong feature of the wealth management market for at least a decade. Drivers of this were the “baby boomer” generation slowly coming to end of cycle, with many of them…

FRENCH firm Bureau Veritas, a leader in testing, inspection and certification, said in an interview last week it considers the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as a game changer in the continent to foster intra-continental trade. AfCFTA came into force on May 30, 2019. Bertrand Martin, Bureau Veritas’s senior vice-president for Africa, told a recent media briefing that Bureau Veritas played a key role in creating a sustainable trade environment. The company’s ambition was to boost intra-Africa trade, he said, which is currently low in comparison to international trade. For example, he explained that in 2021 Africa to Africa exports were $86 billion (R1.5 trillion), whereas African exports to the world were at $557bn and African imports from the word amounted to R609bn as reported…

THERE was some good news in the South African Reserve Bank’s (SARB) Quarterly Bulletin released on March 31. In this case it was not an April Fool joke, but rather the result of many hours of work by the statistical section at the SARB, which determined that the upward phase in the South African business cycle started in May 2020. The business cycle dating section analysed a large number of data series rather than using the easy conventional economist’s definition of saying that two consecutive quarterly declines in economic activity constitute a “recession”. Growth cycles on the other hand have a longer duration and are captured by fluctuations around the long-term trend of economic activity. They are also called trend-adjusted business cycles. The SARB’s business cycle chronology data uses similar…

MURRAY & Roberts (M&R) has completed the sale of its stake in Bombela Concession, and the debt-leaner group is optimistic about prospects for its multinational Mining Platform and Africa-focused power, water industrial (PWI) Platform. The sale of the stake in Bombela Concession to a subsidiary of Europe-based Intertoll International Holdings BV had been finalised, and the R1.26 billion proceeds would be used to repay debt, M&R’s directors said in a trading update yesterday. The share price fell 1.25% on the JSE yesterday to close at R1.58, a price well down from R12.52 a year ago. The share price decline reflects the problems the multinational construction and engineering group has been facing. In August 2022 strong growth in revenue and earnings were reported for the year to June, but…

SHOPRITE said yesterday that its shares will be traded on the A2X stock exchange from April 11, 2023. Its listing would be retained on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), the Namibian Stock Exchange (NSX), and Lusaka Securities Exchange (Luse), and its issued share capital will be unaffected by the secondary listing on A2X, the group said in a statement. Shoprite’s core business is food retailing, furniture, digital commerce, pharmaceutical, ticketing, hospitality, as well as financial and cellular services. A2X is a licensed stock exchange authorised to provide a secondary trading venue for companies. The Shoprite listing will bring the number of instruments listed on A2X to 112, with a combined market capitalisation of around R6.7 trillion. “Shoprite’s listing on A2X highlights an important milestone for A2X as more than…