BizNews Radio

For two years, the Dimension Data executives known as the Campus Six insisted they had done nothing wrong. Now one of them has signed a statement saying otherwise. Former Didata and NTT chief executive Jason Goodall admitted to being secretly on the buying side of the R1.4bn sale of The Campus in Bryanston while advising NTT on the selling side, named four former colleagues, and agreed to pay NTT about R208m. Those he named deny wrongdoing and are awaiting an appeal ruling. David Shapiro, who went to school with the Ord brothers and has watched Didata since its 1980s heyday, told Alec Hogg why he believed someone in the group was always going to crack, where he thought the case goes now, and why the damage may reach well beyond the boardroom. Alec recalled the day Jeremy Ord gave him the hairdryer treatment.

In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Safe Citizen Founder Jonathan Deal expresses concern that - despite the scale of revelations at the Madlanga Commission - certain people “may be protected by people at the top in terms of what they have done and how much the public will get to know about that.” He charges: “In February this year, President (Cyril) Ramaphosa said that organised crime poses the most immediate threat to our democracy. Yet, it appears to me that it is the people at the top of our country who are setting the bar on organised crime. And so when the world asks what is going on in South Africa, I don't think that the investigation should be starting in a tavern, I think it should be starting at the highest levels of government…” Deal warns: “When the people at the top are implicated in lying, stealing, cheating, murdering, and for covering for each other and protecting each other, the nation takes its lesson from that standard…People in high positions all around the world do the most revolting things. But in South Africa, it just seems to be at a scale that is not equal to anywhere else.” Meanwhile, he urges immediate action on the commission’s interim reports. “Let's follow the money upwards to the top, clean the top first.”

Why is the National Sex Offenders Register still not public? Parliament's police committee chair Ian Cameron tells Chris Steyn he sees no urgency from government, and that a random sample of just ten offenders turned up 113 rape convictions, 12 murders and 67 life sentences. MOVE SA's Rali Mampeule says Johannesburg now takes seven years to approve a development, one shopping centre took 18, and wants the private sector to step in. Value investor Piet Viljoen tells Alec Hogg the delisting wave shows South Africa is bumping along the bottom. Plus Wall Street's record close.

Two big JSE companies had received buyout offers in under a month, one of them listed for 62 years, and value investor Piet Viljoen said both deals undervalued the businesses on a ten-year view. He also expected most shareholders to take the money anyway. A day after Sanlam's R505-a-share offer for the rest of Santam, and weeks after India's Solar Industries moved on Omnia, Viljoen told Alec Hogg why insiders and foreign buyers were seeing value that local investors kept missing, and what the delisting wave said about where the market sat in its cycle. He took on the Reg 28 offshore debate, BEE and the 4 November elections, and held his ground when Alec challenged him on MK, before turning to Wall Street, where he argued that a handful of AI stocks were masking real damage beneath record highs as US bond yields climbed to levels last seen in 2002.

The CEO of the South African Housing and Infrastructure Fund and President of the new political party, MOVE SA, Rali Mampeule, has joined the hotly-contested race for Mayor of the City of Johannesburg. In this interview with Chris Steyn, he expresses confidence that he can duplicate in the public sector what he has achieved in the private sector. “In the last six years, through my fund, The South African Housing and Infrastructure Fund, we have delivered more than 68,000 land housing opportunities. …Let's compare that with what the mayor of Ekurhuleni has done in the last five years. I don't think you can match that…We've delivered eleven thousand six hundred and forty jobs through the SAHIF Fund (and) through my investment in a company called MetroFibre, which I bought from Patrice Motsepe, we have connected more than 500,000 households with fast Internet... We've taken more than 100,000 kids to school through the Mampeule Foundation…So we've done it - and we think we can do it better with a better budget from the public sector.” Mampeule advocates a brand of “fearless politics” to rid South Africa of the cadres and the comrades: “And we can go and dance with them in court. We are not scared of them. We're gonna fire the cadre deployees that don't know what they are doing.”