VISA and Standard Charter Bank have launched the first chip based pre-authorised, offline payment card in Ghana. Visa CEMEA president, Anne Cobb, said that their chip card should help overcome infrastructure weaknesses that have traditionally held back the introduction of payment cards in emerging markets. No telephone authorisation is required when the card is used. […]

Do unit trust awards actually provide any useful information for the investor? Thebe Mabanga The unit trust industry is entrusted with the responsibility of looking after the wealth – and often livelihood – of investors with relatively little knowledge. At the end of the March quarter, this wealth amounted to R117-billion and was controlled by […]

Bill Elliot golf Five hundred years after it was first used for something that at least vaguely approached golf as we know it, the jury is still out on whether the Old Course at St Andrews is a work of erratic, supernatural genius or just an erratic work. Views vary from the reverential tone of […]

Thebe Mabanga Comedy lovers can brace themselves for a dose of good fun, rasping wit and downright silliness when two events bring a total of nine comedians to stages in Gauteng. The first event is the 5fm/Savannah Dry Jay Thang Heavyweight Comedy Jam, which brings together some of the circuit’s finest comics. Heavyweight Barry Hilton […]

Khadija Magardie In a landmark judgement, Britain’s highest court has given 3 000 South African litigants the go-ahead to sue United Kingdom asbestos company Cape Plc in the UK. The litigants are all suffering from various asbestos-related illnesses which they contracted while working for Cape, which pulled out of South Africa in the 1970s. The […]

Alex Clark Martin Bauman: A Novel by David Leavitt (Little, Brown) The confessional genre, the colossal growth area in non-fiction of recent years, has attracted a healthy readership and a rather unhealthy amount of critical disdain. Why, detractors protest, must writers shine a light on the shabby corners of their lives simply because they have […]

Chris Visser The biggest challenge facing the average investor is to structure a portfolio that affords the best possible returns for the lowest possible risk. Evidence published in the April 1998 issue of Insurance and Investments indicated that an investor with an offshore element in his portfolio can earn the same return as available domestically, […]

THE King commission of inquiry, set up to probe corruption in South African cricket after Proteas captain Hansie Cronje admitted to bribe taking, is to hold a second and final round of public hearings beginning on October 2. Commission secretary John Bacon said it had not yet been decided whether Cronje would be recalled to […]

South Africa cannot afford not to treat HIV-positive pregnant women with anti- retroviral drugs Howard Barrell The government will save the South African taxpayer more than R800-million a year – and will save more than 8 000 children’s lives each month – if it makes anti- retroviral drugs and milk formula available to all HIV-positive […]

Jaspreet Kindra The African National Congress has launched a concerted effort to woo the Afrikaner community ahead of the local government elections. A sense of urgency has been added to the recruiting drive with the launch of the newly formed Democratic Alliance (DA) of the Democratic Party and the New National Party. The ANC is […]