IMPALA Platinum (Implats), the platinum producer, said yesterday it had bought Canadian miner Platexco for R900m. Implats said the deal, which paves the way for a R1bn mine development in the Eastern Bushveld, valued Toronto-listed Platexco at C$9,50 a share. ”All conditions have been fulfilled and the transaction is unconditional,” Implats said. It said the […]

SOUTH African telecoms utility Telkom has awarded US-based broadband supplier Hughes Network Systems and its local partner Plessey a four-year contract to supply satellite-based communications systems. Hughes will supply and support Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) communications solutions within South Africa and the wider continent. It declined to give a value for the deal. The […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday SOUTH Africans have become slightly more positive about race relations since last year, but more whites have reported discrimination, according to a survey released this week. “An encouraging 44% of South Africans think that race relations have improved in the country since 1994,” the first year of black majority rule, […]

ILDA JACOBS, Washington | Tuesday A SOUTH African woman married to an African-American prisoner has embarked on a 40-day hunger strike in a bid to have him declassified as a gangster so that he will be given parole. Lara Johnson, 34, who was born in Volksrust in Mpumalanga, met Demian Johnson, 36, when he appealed […]

NIGERIA is the world’s 13th poorest country but six individual Nigerians rank among the world’s 100 richest people, press reports said this week. The reports, based on findings of a survey aired by the BBC on Monday, were splashed across the front pages of most newspapers. With a population of over 120 million people, Nigeria’s […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Wednesday A TOTAL of 23291 workers in the formal business sector lost their jobs between June and September this year, Statistics SA reported this week. The shed jobs were out of a total figure of 4735052 employees, Annette Myburgh of Stats SA told reporters in Pretoria on Tuesday. The decline in […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday THE army captain who apparently used pictures of President Thabo Mbeki and other government leaders as shooting targets is the victim of a “smear campaign”, Beeld newspaper reports. The captain is innocent and a highly respected member of the National Defence Force, Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota told reporters on […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki has said in remarks published this week that next year’s February budget would provide a boost for the economy. ”In the forthcoming budget, there will be, I am quite certain, an increase in investment activity by the public sector,” he told the country’s Star newspaper. […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday SOUTH Africa is losing more than R23bn per year in direct and indirect income to the approximately 32 Asian, Italian, Nigerian and Russian crime syndicates currently established in the country, according to a crime report by the American CIA and FBI. Afrikaans daily newspaper Beeld said the report described South […]