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/ 27 January 2006

Travel flattens the fiscus

I was hoping that I would be able to avoid writing about the now scandalous R700 000 "Gravy Plane" holiday trip to the United Arab Emirates, taken recently by our highly regarded Deputy President, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, her husband, the wife of a Cabinet minister and several of Ms Mlambo-Ngcuka’s own and her secretary’s children.

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/ 27 January 2006

AU delays tough decisions

Of all the African leaders celebrating the successful negotiation of their new-look union’s toughest diplomatic hurdle, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe was the most joyful.This is hardly surprising, since his peers in the 53-nation African Union have once again let him off the hook.

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/ 27 January 2006

Cloaks, daggers … and rocks

The story of the British diplomats caught using a transceiver hidden inside a rock in Moscow as their dead-letter drop would not, in itself, make a novel. What we know is only the tip of the iceberg; the novel is the rest of the iceberg. Who were the diplomats collecting information from?

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/ 27 January 2006

BEE scorecards now available online

Small business owners can stop fretting over the costs of compliance with complex codes of black economic empowerment thanks to an innovative Web-based scorecard solution. Dijon de Jager, a qualified chartered accountant, launched Mpower Ratings in 2004 in an attempt to cater for small, medium and micro-enterprises.