Jim Jones

The African National Congress Youth League and Brett Kebble’s other political clients must face facts: the vast scale of the murdered businessman’s crimes has become inescapable. What has also become clear is that Kebble could not have looted and manipulated the companies he controlled without the active or unknowing participation of others.

The wry Jo’burg adage "save face, not money" is again coming true as Harmony Gold extricates itself from its fast-failing bid for Gold Fields. The conundrum that Harmony now faces is how to put a positive spin on the expensive and embarrassing consequences of what promises to become an abortive bid.

The increasingly desperate struggle sparked by Harmony’s hostile bid climaxes in a shareholders meeting this week. Gold Fields’s shareholders will vote on the proposal that their company should merge its mining interests outside South Africa with those of Canadian miner IAMGold. The merger would result in a new company, to be called Gold Fields International, owned 30% by IAMGold’s present shareholders and 70% by Gold Fields’s.

Harmony’s Bernard Swanepoel and Gold Fields’s Ian Cockerill are determined men — determined not to lose in the corporate world. Neither could count on inherited wealth or influence. Both have worked their way up from the rockface. They are driven to succeed. Yet these two are face-to-face in one of South Africa’s more rancorous hostile takeovers. Harmony’s hostile bid for Gold Fields may be secretly
decided in the Kremlin.