Star 2023-09-15

SOUTH Africa needed a “war room” to boost its oil and gas developments and to better co-ordinate government departments on these projects, Deputy Minister in the Presidency for Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Pinky Kekana said yesterday. She said in an address to the Southern Africa Oil & Gas Conference 2023 that “Mozambique is up and running, Namibia is up and running, South Africa wake up!” She said that the Petroleum Agency for South Africa (Pasa) estimated South Africa potentially held 27 billion barrels of oil and 60 trillion cubic metres gas offshore, let alone the onshore resources, but development in the sector remains weak due to a number of factors, including weak infrastructure, insufficient investment and technological issues. She said the “war room” should comprise all the relevant…

Market analyst says that Sibanye-Stillwater ‘has struggled to fix the productivity issues’ SIBANYE-Stillwater extended its gains on the JSE by 8% yesterday despite announcing a restructuring exercise that could catastrophically cull nearly 3 000 jobs under its South African gold operations that have been hit by operational, safety and viability challenges at the Kloof 4 shaft. The diversified precious metals miner extended its run as one of the top performing shares on the JSE yesterday, with its stock closing 7.92% higher at R29.71. Market analyst Martin Rogers said yesterday that Sibanye-Stillwater “has struggled to fix the productivity issues, which was compounded by the August incident which caused significant damage” to the shaft infrastructure. The latest restructuring exercise announced by Sibanye yesterday could affect as many as 2 389…

AAFRIFORUM and Solidarity have vowed to continue challenging the race-based laws in relation to the government’s measures in the relief fund set up to ease the impact of Covid-19 on the tourism industry. This comes after the Cabinet approved the Department of Tourism’s request to reduce the requirements for black ownership from 51% to 30% in the qualification criteria for the R1.2 billion Tourism Equity Fund (TEF) yesterday. The department launched the TEF in January 2021 to provide a new financial support mechanism to stimulate investment and transformation in the tourism sector. The two groups, who challenged the implementation of the TEF in court, suggested that it deviated materially from the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, read with the Tourism Code. However, the fund was placed on hold after…

ANCHOR Capital is set to unveil its international expansion in coming weeks, Peter Armitage, the founder and CEO of Anchor Capital, revealed yesterday. As generational wealth exits South Africa, which is a risk to the investment firm’s growth trajectory, Anchor Capital is securing its future. This as it has clients both locally and internationally. Armitage, along with his investment team, yesterday in a round-table discussion with the media shared insights into the current investment landscape, in a wide-ranging conversation from commodities, South African woes such as logistics and the power crisis, to exciting AI and cybercrime tech stocks and the depressing fact of the drying up of listings on the JSE, among other trends. Anchor Capital, while bringing home the bacon for its investment clients, shared that SA Inc is…

RETAIL lending had started to slow down as affordability and interest rate pressures started to pile into the pockets of South Africans, FirstRand CEO Alan Pullinger said yesterday, although he highlighted that resurgent corporate replacement activity and infrastructure development would cover up for this. FirstRand yesterday posted a 12% firming in normalised earnings, which amounted to R36.7 billion and yielded a similar rate of growth in annual dividends at 384 cents for the full year to the end of June 2023. However, shares in the company closed 3.18% weaker at R68.80 yesterday on the JSE – where the owner of RMB, WesBank, Aldermore and FNB has a market value of about R384bn. “Mortgages and housing and finance is already starting to slow because it is very interest rate…

THE CABINET has confirmed that Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana will soon be publishing the guidelines for the proposed budget cuts as the National Treasury looks to austerity measures on the back of rising constraints on the fiscus ahead of the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) on November 1. This comes after leaked reports of Treasury’s circular to all government departments and provinces instructing them to slash budgets by up to 15%, freeze all vacancies and infrastructure roll-out programmes as part of policy of fiscal consolidation. Treasury’s Public Finance Management Office, headed by Dr Mampho Modise, has been consulting extensively about the Cabinet directive compelling government departments to cut down on spending in the face of an economic downturn precipitated by load shedding. Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni yesterday…