Elephant group safe for now
A shareholders’ meeting to determine the fate of the Elephant Consortium, an empowerment group with an estimated R6 billion stake in Telkom, was postponed on Friday.
A group of shareholders in the consortium was scheduled to table a proposal that would have resulted in other members voting on whether to cash in and abandon the BEE group.
This came a few hours before SA’s communications regulator Icasa rescinded Telkom’s sale of its stake in mobile operator Vodacom, saying it now needed approval, which in turn raised speculation on Friday that Vodacom’s listing tomorrow may be postponed.
Should the listing go ahead, the consortium stands to benefit by billions of rands in dividends.
But the shareholders in Johannesburg failed to reach a quorum, resulting in the meeting being postponed for a week.
Shareholders who managed to attend included the SABC’s former CEO Dali Mpofu, US businessman Jim Myers, former government adviser Rafique Bagus, and Alan Norman — a former banker with Absa, one of the funders of the Telkom deal.
The Telkom empowerment deal has been subjected to a succession of inquiries since Elephant acquired an estimated R9-billion stake in the fixed-line operator in 2005. Business Times has established that further investigations are now under way into a deal that is shrouded in secrecy.
They include a probe by the Government Employees Pension Fund into why the Public Investment Corporation warehoused the consortium’s shares.
Disgruntled stakeholders in the Elephant Consortium last week described the entire empowerment transaction as a “mockery” of BEE.
The disbanding of the consortium would result in dividends from the listing going to settle debts, before division of the remaining proceeds.
Last week shareholders, who three years ago instructed lawyers to unmask secret shareholders in the consortium, said the entire empowerment transaction has been shrouded in controversy and secrecy.
Business Times has established that shares in the consortium have been traded even though the terms of the transaction stipulated that no trading could take place until May 2010; that the ANC is a beneficiary within the Elephant Consortium; and that former ANC treasurer-general Mendi Msimang and Alan Norman are alleged to control more than a million shares in the consortium.
The 15.1% stake in Telkom was bought from the US-based firm Thintana.
Business Times
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