http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=133873

The most damaging claim as it relates to Woolworths alleges that Thomas, repatriated money from South Africa to Australia for Susman’s benefit. When Moneyweb asked if this was true, a Woolworth’s spokesperson said, “this is a personal matter”‘.

Mr Susman has provided Woolworths with the statement below in response to the following paragraph in your story:

“I travel to Australia regularly and a small portion of my travel allowance was taken to Australia ahead of my arrival. I am advised that this may not have been the correct procedure and I will take the necessary steps to regularise the situation.”

A position on the rest of the claims remains as outlined in the attached announcement from the Australian Stock Exchange.

*Simon Susman is CEO of Woolworths

Published: 2010/09/09 07:20:11 AM

HOW surprised would you be by a comparison between the Kyrgyz Republic and SA? This week a former colleague pointed out a “Letter from Bishkek”, which appeared recently in Harpers magazine. There has been recent civil unrest in the Kyrgyz Republic (the country you might know as Kyrgyzstan, which is, as everybody knows, a different country from the much larger Kazakhstan immediately to its north).

The letter, written by Scott Horton, quotes an unnamed lawyer who made this comment about his country: “We are witnessing the process of ‘lumpenizatsiya’.” When asked what he meant by this curiously Marxist coinage, the lawyer explained, “It’s the process whereby the reins of government are seized by waves of people who are progressively less educated, less capable, and more brutish. Threats and intimidation take the place of moral suasion and law. Clan loyalties take the place of a sense of duty to the state.” Now what country does that remind you of?

The situation in Kyrgyzstan is much more intense than SA, perhaps for the simple reason that the country’s economy is weaker — it’s the smallest and poorest of the five independent Turkic states. Like many of the Turkic states that broke away from the Soviet Union, the country has been a notional democracy but was actually a single-party dominant system. The economy was not Soviet but the system of government was — at least until a kind of democratic revolution broke out earlier this year.

Horton writes that the elections to be held there on October 10 are expected to be free, fair and democratic — “the first in the history of the nation, or even the region, to genuinely warrant those labels”.

Reading his article I also got a sense of the differences between SA and other struggling countries that were essentially reconstituted in that heady period around 1990 — and also how much better our situation is. The fact that SA is at an odd point in its history is both truth and a truism. It strikes me, though, that it is at an odd point of a special type — it is complicated by some of the problems that countries such as Kyrgyzstan face, but also by some they do not face. At the broadest level, SA faces a rich/poor split, but also a split within the middle class.

So many of SA’s problems come down to the different states, outlooks, expectations and mentality of the different sections of its middle class. Unfortunately, this difference can be reflected racially, although I suspect it’s less racial than it seems.

Viewed positively, the middle class is divided essentially between people who want to preserve wealth and those who want to create wealth. Viewed negatively, the middle class is divided between those who have wealth and those who want it.

The wealth creationists are typically empowerment supportive, future-orientated, expansionist, supportive of government intervention in the economy, education-hungry and taxation-neutral. Wealth preservationists are tax-averse, against economic intervention, grumble about empowerment and are quite often free-market supportive.

This difference infects not only political choices, but even arguments about intervention to weaken the rand, for example. The expansionists crave intervention and a lower rand, since their existing savings are less significant in their minds than their future earnings. For the preservationists, a weaker rand means, effectively, their savings decline in value.

The debate is visible elsewhere too, especially in the debate about the level of interest rates. The expansionists want them lower because they are typically indebted, and the preservationists want them higher because they are typically cash-flush.

After the public sector strike, SA appears split between the working class and the middle class, whether “middle class” is represented by management within the government or the private sector. Yet this is something of a chimera. A good portion of the state employees who were on strike are technically part of the lower middle class. They might not think of themselves that way, but they are. The strike shows achieving a balance between the branches of the middle class is as important as achieving a balance between the working class and the middle class.

- Cohen is contributing editor.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s Standard Bank (JSE:SBK) has been disappointed by the revenue so far from its tie-up with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the head of Africa’s largest lender told Reuters on Wednesday.

Jacko Maree, Standard Bank’s group chief executive, also said in an interview at the Reuters bureau in Johannesburg that the bank was in “hiring mode” for skilled bankers, and aimed to double its Nigerian branch network this year.

Standard Bank, which is 20 percent owned by ICBC, is targeting the increasing trade flows between Asia and the resource-rich continent.

It currently has about 40 bankers working in China with ICBC, but has struggled to generate revenue from the fast-growing Asian country, he said.

“We definitely would have thought by now we would have converted more of those deals into revenue,” Maree said.

“So we are disappointed.”

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Dept-spends-R15m-on-TVs-20100901

Hey Gwebs,

There’s something rotten going on!

Thanks for pointing it out.

What’s the deal? Is ANC still cashing in on apartheid profiteering?

But, instead of silence, the shareholders have taken furious action – and brought to light an explosive secret document in which it is revealed how the Mbeki government was given a detailed account of the extraordinary extent of frauds on the state perpetrated by the Afrikaner nationalist elite in the apartheid era – frauds that their ANC successors have until now chosen to cover up.

I think the point is the ANC is doing nothing to retrieve the money, or else it is benefitting from the original fraud.

Is the ANC protfiteering from Apartheid crimes?

http://www.noseweek.co.za/

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article629096.ece/Nzimande–Freeze-government-ministers-salaries