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=A narrow escape from state’s wheeler-dealers=

The Insider, Business Day, 31 October 2007
African National Congress spokesman Smuts Ngonyama was on the radio last week warning that freedom to comment in the press might have to be curtailed unless the party got a fairer crack of the whip. He didn’t think, you’ll remember, that cartoons with showers coming out of politicians’ heads should be allowed without the “context” of the shower being explained and that, anyway, putting such things on opinion pages was quite unacceptable.

What you wouldn’t know is that at the same time as he was preparing the ground for an attack on media freedom at this coming December’s ANC conference, he was also involved in a hush-hush attempt by what might best be called the “Mbeki camp” to buy control of Johncom, the publishers of the Sunday Times, The Sowetan and half of Business Day and the Financial Mail.

The Insider hears there was a vigorous attempt last week to head off a deal between Tokyo Sexwale’s Mvelaphanda group and Johncom as the Mbeki administration realised the newspaper group was about to fall to Sexwale and, possibly, Cyril Ramaphosa. Calls were made and the cold hand of former Deutsche Bank SA chief Martin Kingston was detected in the fog. Kingston is the son-in-law of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, revelations about whom in the Sunday Times have turned the Mbeki administration puce with an unquenchable rage.

Another member of the Mbeki camp, Saki Macozoma, is also understood to have been dispatched into the fray.

Kingston knows the ins and outs of the players at Johncom intimately, having been the original merchant banker to an agreement that Ramaphosa (and then Sexwale and Patrice Motsepe) would be Johncom’s preferred empowerment partner. Once contemptuous of the circle around Mbeki, Kingston has grown closer to it since losing his position at Deutsche.

Ronald Suresh Roberts had probably begun to write the first of his new Sunday Times leader page columns. But masterminding all this effort would have been Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad, which is why it failed. Pahad would have been gloriously oblivious to the irony that he is, on one hand, trying to close down the Sunday Times by calling on advertisers to boycott it, and on the other trying to control it and buy it.

In the end, Pahad will have achieved neither the paper’s closure nor control of it. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Frustrated at the agonising pace at which the Johncom management was moving (probably due to the political interference), the talks between Johncom and the empowerment buyers were called off.

Almost immediately, though, Mvela went to the biggest shareholder, asset manager Allan Gray, and did a private deal to buy its 30% or so in Johncom (or what will remain of it in the next few months) for about R1,5bn.

Why didn’t they think of it before?


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=3033703**

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