Employees at PPC are apparently planning to sign a petition in support of the reinstatement of Ketso Gordhan, the former chief executive of the listed cement and lime producer.
This follows the announcement by PPC’s board a week ago that Gordhan had “regrettably resigned due to differences of opinion with the board, regarding board procedures for the approval of certain decisions” and the board’s decision to ignore his “impassioned plea” to allow him to retract his resignation on the Sunday night before it announced he had quit.
Gordhan told Business Report yesterday that he had been informed by friends in the business that ordinary workers planned “to sign a petition to get me back” as chief executive and believed the decision not to allow him to retract his resignation was not in the best interests of shareholders.
“I think I am the largest individual shareholder in PPC. I own 1.4 million shares and am therefore aligned with shareholders,” he said.
“In the last 20 months, PPC has made more progress with its strategy of expanding into the rest of the continent than in a long time.
“Many of the prospects are unfortunately relationship driven and dependent on me for a successful outcome.”
Gordhan said that in the next two days he would be speaking to as many significant shareholders as he could and he would encourage them to get him reinstated.
He believed significant shareholders in PPC were concerned about what had happened but had not yet made up their mind about what they were willing to do.
His hope was that a group of shareholders representing significant investors in PPC would meet with the board “and avoid a showdown and come to a negotiated agreement about what needs to be done to restore stability at PPC”.
Gordhan declined to identify the senior executive involved in the dispute, stressing that he was not trying to personalise the issue.
He confirmed he wanted the senior executive to exit the business because the team managed by this person had become “very dysfunctional”.
“More importantly, I had negotiated a very important deal for PPC and in the execution process this executive constantly undermined me, and the partner indicated to me that they were considering walking away from the deal.
“What the executive did could have scuppered the deal, and almost did. I fixed it up and the executive would then still not support what I was doing. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.
Azola Lowan, the strategy and investor relations executive, said yesterday that PPC had “nothing further to say on this matter for the time being”.
Shareholder activist Theo Botha said the situation was “messy for the whole company” and the only way shareholders would get Gordhan reinstated was by calling a general meeting. Botha questioned how PPC’s board would deal with this issue once shareholders got involved, and when last the firm conducted an independent evaluation of its board.
Charl Kocks, the principal of Ratings Afrika, said independent board evaluations that were done with rigour and with the right level of experience were extremely helpful, but were not being done. He said it was vital that independent boards were open to that scrutiny and the difficult situation at PPC could have been avoided.
The Public Investment Corporation (PIC) said it was “in total support” of the PPC board, Bloomberg reported.
“We remain in total support of the PPC board, their African growth strategy as well as the quality, depth and breadth of management,” it said.
Gordhan’s departure was “an internal matter which the board is handling”.
The PIC is the biggest investor in PPC, with 12 percent.
PPC’s shares rose 1 percent to close at R30.20 yesterday.