It hasn’t been a great week for Comair, what with two of its non-executive directors offloading all their shares in what looks like a rush, the company bungling the accompanying Stock Exchange News Service (Sens) announcement and then bungling the correction to that announcement.
But we in the print media industry know how easy it is to make a mistake and then be forced to look at it for what seems an eternity. So we will not be making any issue of the fact that the initial Sens announcement referred to the purchase of a large block of shares by Atul Gupta and Ronnie Ntuli instead of a sale.
So what if this was the largest single-day trading that the Comair share had seen.
Gupta sold 22.8 million shares at R3 a piece, as did Ntuli of his 5.8 million shares.
The combined 28.6 million shares sold on Monday, which is equivalent to about 6 percent of Comair’s equity base, compares with the 38 million shares that were traded throughout the whole of the 2013 financial year.
And how fortunate was it that Comair had remembered to do what every JSE company does these days – to secure shareholder approval for a share buyback at its latest annual general meeting, which took place a week ago? Apparently, 99 percent of the shareholders supported the buyback.
Inevitably, everyone’s wondering what Gupta and Ntuli will do with the proceeds; not many believe they will use it as down payment for a controlling stake in Safair.
The other puzzle is whether Gupta, who didn’t seem overly committed to Comair, and Ntuli had hoped to dispose of their shares quietly and without fuss or had planned to cause Comair maximum embarrassment.
Fiona Tregenna outed
What more would you expect? As an exceptionally highly qualified academic from Cambridge University, the Media24 guys must have been onto her immediately.
They’d seen all the movies about Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Philby and knew what those Cambridge academics were up to with the Commies back in the 1930s, which was around the same time that here in South Africa the Media24 foundling, Die Burger, was desperately promoting the Broederbond’s message of Afrikaner nationalism.
Professor Fiona Tregenna has just been outed as a senior member of the SA Communist Party (SACP) and has been removed from a Competition Tribunal panel that was to consider allegations of anti-competitive behaviour against the media group.
The tribunal hasn’t identified who it was that fingered Tregenna; in its usual timid way it merely notes that “a party to the litigation” has raised concerns about Tregenna’s qualifications as a member of the panel.
There are only two parties to this litigation – the Competition Commission and Media24. You don’t have to be an enormously well-educated Cambridge academic to guess that it wasn’t the commission – even assuming a post-Ramburuth state of disorientation – that raised concerns.
Tregenna, who is described by some as “more read than red”, was appointed as a part-time tribunal member two months ago and is a member of the central committee of the SACP.
Media24 is absolutely correct to point out that the Competition Act disqualifies any person who is an office bearer of a political party from serving as a member of the tribunal. It matters not whether the party is AgangSA, ANC, EFF, DA or SACP.
In anticipation of such concerns, Tregenna had sought legal advice on the matter and had been told that although an executive member of a political party she was not an office bearer because she did not hold a portfolio.
So where to from here for Tregenna, who could be an excellent addition to the tribunal?
National Development Plan
Business leaders attending the annual general meeting of the Cape Town Chamber of Commerce yesterday were urged to come to the National Development Plan party – invest in the future of South Africa and help to telescope the economy to a gross domestic product of R9 trillion, three times its current size, by 2030.
Minister in the Presidency for National Planning Trevor Manuel told the gathering: “The challenge that the National Development Plan identifies is that we need to nearly double jobs by 2030 by adding 11 million jobs to the economy to reach 24 million. Per capita income should rise from about R50 000 per person to about R120 000, but be distributed more evenly across the population. The economy would have to expand to almost three times the present level.”
He acknowledged certain pitfalls in achieving this, including high indebtedness, particularly of poorer workers. After Marikana, it was found that the mine itself was serviced by no fewer than 14 micro-lenders “with miners being indebted to several at the same time”.
Poverty needed to be eliminated and inequality reduced. “Engaging with these challenges requires leadership at national, provincial, organisation and company level,” he suggested. Decreased enterprise diversity and de-industrialisation were also problems.
“How will the cycle of debt be stopped? Bearing in mind the excessive interest and other charges being levied by micro-lenders, are companies able to take over the burden using their cash flow reserves and reduce the pressure?”
He also suggested the chamber gets involved in ensuring “equalising the outcomes (of education)” through developing partnerships between needy schools and business people.
Manuel suggested the injection of “impassioned involvement of the business people” into impoverished schools.
Building the country together is the key to the future, but the mechanics of how to do it remain elusive.
Edited by Banele Ginindza. With contributions from Ann Crotty and Donwald Pressly.