/ 6 December 2006

Cosatu against sale of V&A Waterfront

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in the Western Cape has asked the Competition Commission to block the sale of Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront to a foreign-dominated consortium.

”We’re pretty sure that we’re going to get them to stop it,” Cosatu provincial secretary Tony Ehrenreich said on Wednesday.

He said the letter to the commission was sent earlier in the day.

In a statement, Cosatu said the R7-billion sale would be bad for the economy and bad for the development of a ”sustainable economy that responds to the needs of South Africans”.

Cosatu was concerned that the ”crown jewels” of the Cape were being sold off to foreign interests.

The funding for the investment would not lead to huge amounts of foreign direct investment as a significant portion of it was South African capital.

If models in Dubai were anything to go by, poorer communities would no longer be able to afford to visit the Waterfront.

The Waterfront, which attracts up to 22-million visitors a year, was sold off by the parastatal Transnet.

The consortium is led by London and Regional Properties, which holds just over half of the interest.

The rest is split between Nakheel, a real estate developer owned by the Dubai government, and South African black economic empowerment shareholders — an apportionment that Cosatu described as ”a furtherance of crony capitalism”. — Sapa