Star 2024-07-15

South African billionaire Christo Wiese has lost a court appeal in a case relating to a tax debt owed to the SA Revenue Service (Sars) of R216.6 million. Sars had accused Wiese’s privately- held investment company Titan Group of obstructing the collection of assets in 2013 from one of the companies it owned, Energy Africa, by “dissipating its assets”. According to a judgment by the Supreme Court of Appeal on Friday, this dissipation occurred with the transfer of a loan-account claim Energy Africa held in Titan Share Dealers (TSD) as a dividend in specie to Elandspad Investments Proprietary (Elandspad), its holding company. Energy Africa’s only asset at the time was a loan claim of R216.6m owed by another company in the Titan group, Titan Share Dealers, which Energy Africa passed…

THE International Monetary Fund (IMF) has slashed Botswana’s 2024 growth forecast to 1% from an earlier April estimate of 3.6% due mainly to lower diamond production, it said in a statement. The budget deficit is also expected to widen to 6% from 3.45% due to a fall in mineral revenues, urging the diamond-rich southern African country to consider slowing down new infrastructure projects to help the economy. “The continued (economic) slowdown is mainly due to a fall in diamond production,” the IMF said in a statement released late on Friday. “Some fiscal relaxation is warranted this year given the fall in mineral revenues, but the execution of the ambitious capital budget should be slowed down to contain the deterioration of the deficit and prioritise projects with the highest returns,” the…

Pick n Pay closed Friday’s trade session on the JSE 1.64% higher, capping a 3.52% uptick for the seven-day period during which it announced discounted terms for its R4 billion rights offer and also awarded CEO Sean Summers 4 million performance-based shares. Shares in Pick n Pay closed Friday’s trade session at R27.95 and have been up 47% and 32% in the past three months and six months, respectively. Market analyst Simon Brown told Business Report that the terms laid down by Pick n Pay for its rights offer were “not bad considering that the high share price” had helped the company under its latest scheme. There are high hopes that shareholders will subscribe to the company’s rights offer to which the Ackerman family have already said they are committed…

The property industry has called on the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to start cutting interest rates as property sales have plummeted by 25% due to buyers delaying their purchases to wait out the high borrowing costs. This comes as the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is expected on Thursday to keep the repurchase rate (repo rate) unchanged at 8.25% from May last year as headline consumer inflation remains above the 4.5% midpoint of the 3% to 6% target range. However, the chance of one interest rate cut at the end of this year has grown as the US June’s headline inflation fell to 3% below the expected 3.1% and down on May’s 3.3% year-on-year. Seef Property Group on Friday said the delays in cutting the rate were doing…

The Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) has refused to be drawn to comment on whether it would be taking any action against its chairperson Dondo Mogajane after he was implicated in the looting of VBS Mutual Bank. In an affidavit leaked on Thursday, convicted former chairperson of VBS Tshifhiwa Matodzi alleged that Mogajane accepted a R1 million “gratification” when he was director-general of National Treasury in order to allow the defunct bank to continue taking municipalities’ deposits in contravention of the law. Mogajane was appointed chairperson of the board of the GEPF in July 2022 after spending 23 years at National Treasury, five of which he served as director-general. The GEPF is the largest pension fund in Africa with more than R2.3 trillion in assets under its management.…

WHAT COMES to mind when towns such as oThongathi in KwaZulu-Natal and Malelane in Mpumalanga are mentioned? The common denominator/factor is the sugar industry. These towns were developed mainly as the result of the cane-growing and milling activities in these regions. Over the years, the industry has proven beyond doubt that it is a catalyst for socio-economic development in some of the deeply rural and job-starved areas of KwaZulu-Natal. The industry is the beacon of hope for many rural communities, especially for thousands of black small-scale growers spread across the two provinces. It is an industry that creates 65 000 direct and 270 000 indirect jobs, with at least one million people dependent on the sugar cane-growing and milling sectors. KwaZulu-Natal is synonymous with sugar cane farming. Anyone who grew…