Max Gebhardt Senior management at First National Bank (FNB) are worried about the future of lucrative provincial government banking accounts because its managing director Barry Swart is widely perceived as guilty of nepotism at worst and foolishness at best. Senior management fears were compounded by calls this week from the South African Commercial, Catering and […]

Mail & Guardian Reporter SERVING judges who dotted South Africa’s law books with inane judgments in the name of apartheid might not be out of the woods as far as the truth commission is concerned. Desmond Tutu’s spokesman said this week that although the commission does not have a hit list of apartheid judges, he […]

Rehana Rossouw Shocking information about children in prisons in the Western and Northern Cape emerged this week. Julia Sloth-Nielsen of the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape visited Kimberley Prison and found most of the children there were not being held for serious crimes. In terms of the law, they should […]

Anthony Egan Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa by Mark Gevisser (David Philip, R59,99) Readers of the Mail & Guardian will need no introduction to Mark Gevisser’s profiles of South Africa’s powerful, famous and infamous. Regular readers of his column may, in fact, wonder whether they deserve a re-reading . The short […]

crime wave to fight crime with corruption A policeman is shot while allegedly robbing Eastgate … the head of a car- theft unit is caught in a stolen car … Angella Johnson investigates rife police corruption EVIDENCE is mounting that corrupt police officers are at the heart of the country’s escalating crime-wave, with worrying signs […]

KAREN DAVIES finds out what Yvonne Chaka Chaka has been up to between starting a limo-hire service and receiving a songstress of Africa award in Zaire SHE was chosen above Madonna to launch Pepsi in Nigeria. Flowers were strewn on the road from Entebbe Airport to Kampala in Uganda for her visit there and she […]

of cocaine INSPECTOR Jacques Swanepoel is not an exception within a police force widely perceived to be teeming with rogue cops. Swanepoel (33) has been charged with murder, assault, possession of cocaine and defeating the ends of justice. He was granted R1 000 bail. A member of the hard-pressed South African Narcotic Bureau (Sanab), it […]

sword’ Lynda Loxton Rembrandt chairman Johann Rupert this week shrugged off the growing anti-tobacco lobby in the United States but warned the South African government against trying to milk more excise duty from the local industry. When asked at the annual meeting in Stellenbosch what the recent court ruling against US company Brown and Williamson […]

Marion Edmunds The almost defunct Immigrants Selection Board is delivering some final blows before it finally rolls over and dies. The board, which is to due to be replaced at the end of November by a new legitimate structure, is considering defying a court judgment in which it was instructed to reconsider the permanent residence […]

Foreign doctors say they are being treated like slaves compared with Cuban doctors, reports Philippa Garson Some foreign and local doctors are smouldering at the red-carpet treatment handed out to the Cuban doctors. A second batch of Cubans arrived from Havana last week. Disgruntled at their Cuban colleagues’ welcome, foreign doctors who have been working […]