SOUTH Africa’s Competition Commission says it sought to scupper a joint venture by local units of BP, Caltex and Shell because it would have squeezed competition once the domestic industry was deregulated. Earlier, global oil giants Shell Group, BP Amoco Plc and Caltex Oil cancelled plans for the Trident supply and distribution joint venture after […]

SOUTH Africa’s Del Monte food group has signalled it would agree to a R1.15bn bid from Italian counterpart Cirio, describing the cash offer as ”fair and reasonable” in a note to shareholders. Cirio said in December it had launched a cash offer of 525 cents per share for the entire capital of Del Monte Royal […]

MARIAM ISA, Johannesburg | Wednesday SOUTH Africa’s gold giants are set to unveil better earnings for the final quarter of 2000, but a merger between the two largest producers may eclipse the results, say analysts. Speculation has mounted in the past week that world leader AngloGold would launch a bid for its smaller rival Gold […]

HILARY GUSH, Johannesburg | Tuesday SOUTH Africa’s M-Cell, which owns mobile phone operator MTN, says the $285m it paid for its Nigerian GSM licence was at the high end of its expectations and would hit earnings this year. ”It would have an impact on our earnings,” M-Cell chair Irene Charnley told a news conference, without […]

THE leader of a security task force accused of terrorising and brutalising Nigeria’s troubled Ogoni people has told an astonished human rights hearing he was proud of what he did. Colonel Paul Okuntimo told a packed conference hall the task force sent in 1993 by the late military ruler Sani Abacha to suppress unrest in […]

THE burnt body of an Mpumalanga farmer was found hidden in a mealie field at the weekend – five days after he was reported missing. Herman Jones, 59, of Klipplatsdrift Farm in Standerton, disappeared on January 16. His body was found about 200 metres from the house in an area that had already been searched. […]

THE Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has boosted security as a tense Kinshasa prepares to bury the country’s assassinated president Laurent Kabila in the capital. Angola, one of Kabila’s allies in the huge conflict that swamped his country during his rule, said it was sending in extra troops amid fears that the ceremony could spark […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Wednesday THE state and the taxpayer last year lost at least R390m because government is preventing the Judge Willem Heaths Special Investigative Unit from investigating cases of corruption, says the unit’s annual report. According to a report in Afrikaans daily Beeld, the figure of R390m for the financial year ending […]

THE man who introduced South Africa’s Protea to America, the late Howard Asper, has been awarded the 2000 California Floriculture Hall of Fame Award. Asper, who died in 1993, took a Protea seed from its native South African soil in 1961 and successfully propagated it in California in 1965. Today, he is widely recognised as […]