Tag: The Star

Black groups and mysterious Chinese investor take control of Independent media group

The Star, once South Africa's biggest daily, now also belongs to Sekunjalo
The Star, once South Africa’s biggest daily, now also belongs to Sekunjalo

Sapa reports that Cosatu and its some of its affiliates make up a large portion of Sekunjalo Independent Media’s (SIM) shareholding, the company said on Thursday. But a mysterious Chinese investor is providing some of the funding and could end up with a 20% stake in one of South Africa’s most influential newspaper groups.

Employees of Independent News and Media (INM) would get 10 percent of the shares in company, SIM chairman Iqbal Surve said in a statement.

“We know we can continue to gro

w and run this media group profitably,” he said.

Independent News and Media in Ireland confirmed on June 17 that its shareholders had voted in favour of the sale of the media group to the Sekunjalo Group. The two shareholders of Independent News and Media SA (INMSA) would be SIM, with 75 percent, and the Government Employees’ Pension Fund (GEPF) acting through the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), with 25 percent. This would ensure that INMSA was “firmly in South African hands”, said Surve.

He said 63 percent of SIM’s shares would be held by Sekunjalo Investment Holdings; the Congress of SA Trade Unions’ (Cosatu) investment company Kopano Ke Matlaka, represented by Collins Matjila; the SA Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union Investments Group, represented by Andre Kriel; the Food and Allied Workers’ Union, represented by Basebenzi Investments and Katishi Masemola; and employees, via a special purpose vehicle.

The other 37 percent would be held by a number of “broad-based value adding partners”, he said.

These included the Black Business Chamber (Western Cape) and various independent South African Women’s business community organisations, represented by Lindiwe Barbara Ngcobo, and Manemele Maria.

Sekunjalo Digital Media would help drive a digital and mobile growth strategy; and the Mvezo Development Trust, represented by Mandla Mandela, would provide for the development of the communities of the Eastern Cape.

They were joined by the Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Association (through the Military Veterans’ Trust); and the Western Cape Development Trust, which would focus on the provision of bursaries for journalists from black communities.

Other shareholders were prominent entrepreneurs and business people such as Sandile Zungu, and media and advertising personalities Tim Modise and Groovin Nchabeleng, from the Blue Print Group.

“The Sekunjalo Consortium will at all times have control of INMSA, with a number of funding partners sharing in the equity of the company,” said Surve Funding would come from SIM itself, from banks, the trade union investment companies, the GEPF, and a Chinese consortium.

“To ensure that the business has sufficient capital resources to reinvest in vernacular titles, digital strategy, reinvigorating existing titles and an African growth strategy, additional funding has been arranged which may see a further shareholding/investment of 20 percent placed with the Chinese consortium,” he said.

INMSA owns the Cape Times, the Cape Argus, the Weekend Argus, the Daily Voice, The Star, Pretoria News, Saturday Star, Sunday Independent, Diamond Fields Advertiser, Weekend Pretoria News, Daily News, The Mercury, Post, Independent on Saturday, the Sunday Tribune, the Zulu daily newspaper, Isolezwe, and its Saturday and Sunday editions.

It also owns a number of weekly community newspapers in the Western Cape, and has investments in the community newspaper markets in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

It also owns and runs Independent Online (IOL) and publishes three Conde Nast international magazine brands: House & Garden, GQ and Glamour.

Surve said he strongly believed in the future of print media in South Africa.

“This is the beginning of a strategy to invest in newspapers across Africa, and to focus on developing digital and other cross-media opportunities.”

The Media Workers’ Association of SA (Mwasa) welcomed the announcement and said it believed the staff share would revolutionise labour relations in the media sector.

“Mwasa welcomes this offer to empower all staff and looks forward to further formal engagements to determine logistical and operational arrangements for the participation of staff in the direction of the new company,” it said.

It looked forward to meeting the challenges and opportunities the announcement presented, and congratulated Surve and the SIM consortium on a “watershed achievement”.

The Star’s Janet Smith finds Steve Hofmeyr ‘not stupid’. Wow!

Steve Hofmeyr at the celebrity roast

Janet Smith, The Star’s resident Afrikaner-hating, Boer-bashing muck columnist, wrote the following piece about Steve Hofmeyr in which she comes to the following amazing if disappointing conclusion:

“That’s the thing about the Afrikaner superstar. You want him to be stupid. You expect him to be stupid.

But he just isn’t.”

The most dangerous white man in SA?

September 21 2012 at 09:00am
By Janet Smit

INLSA

Steve Hofmeyr on the red carpet before the beginning of the show, “The Roast of Steve of Steve Hofmeyr” at Lyric Theatre, Gold Reef City. Photo: Dumisani Sibeko

Johannesburg – The crowd jostled shoulder to shoulder outside the Afrikaans Protestant Church in Ventersdorp. Flat-haired tannies in sensible shoes tripped over each other for a better view.

The whine of bikes revving in the church parking lot wound higher and lower.

The wrinkles on old army uniforms pinched middle-aged men around their bellies.

Dirges moaned out of the wooden doors of the church.

No one else was allowed in. It was packed solid.

Only Eugene Terre’Blanche’s corpse inside his coffin could still be accommodated.

Not far away, national police commissioner Bheki Cele had arrived at Terre’Blanche’s house in town in his blue light convoy to deliver his condolences. But he was out-pipped at the celebrity post when, Moses-like, the real deal was already parting the sea of fans of the dead man in the crush outside the church.

It was Steve Hofmeyr, the country’s biggest-selling pop star, soap opera hero and notorious philanderer. His arrival in Ventersdorp on this bright, fascist morning had tipped his borderline racist status close to the edge. But he didn’t seem to mind. His sunglasses were too rock star to suggest he wanted to be incognito.

This was upfront. Hofmeyr had come to pay tribute to Terre’Blanche. And the people in black, proudly wearing their AWB sew-ons, couldn’t have been more delighted. A rock star for their rock star.

But Hofmeyr doesn’t think his appearance at the funeral more than two years ago deserved as much attention as it got. He brushed it off.

“I think people underestimate how wide I see the Afrikaner – from far right to far left. It’s not just a small little group. It’s really massive.

“Terre’Blanche always tried to get me to join the AWB. But we only met after his prison stint at Rooigrond, and that’s when he told me: ‘I did wrong.’

“He had changed, he had found religion. I respect that. So when I walked into that church, I knew that’s what I was doing there.”

The trouble is, that was not the only example of Hofmeyr teetering on the edge of being an unredeemed white racist.

There were several others, including the threat he made to sing a song about “k*****s”, if the judge in last year’s Julius Malema hate speech trial had ruled in favour of the then-ANCYL president singing Dubul’ iBhunu (Shoot the Boer).

Frans Cronje, the deputy CEO of the Institute of Race Relations, was so unsettled that he wrote a letter to Hofmeyr in the newspapers.

“You are obviously ignorant of the fact that white people occupy a very privileged and controversial position in South Africa. Their long-term future… depends on the extent to which they can use that position to promote a more stable, just, and prosperous society.

“I tell you that if you think that we can fight racism with racism, then you are as much of a fool as you are racist.

“It shames me… You are in fact an embarrassment… and a disgrace.”

But Hofmeyr didn’t seem at all cowed. Before he appeared on Africa’s first roast – recorded last Tuesday and to be aired on Comedy Central on DStv on Monday night – he warned: “I can’t give any guarantees that I won’t get emotional” about race issues and Afrikaner issues.

Fortunately for Hofmeyr, the scriptwriters, roastmaster Trevor Noah and the roasters extracted no shouts or tears for the volk. In fact, they unwittingly gave his career a boost with a free ride on charges of racism. Instead, they went with a lame volley of jibes about his energetic sperm count.

The only moment at which Hofmeyr almost lost his nerve was in response to jokes about Boer hero Piet Retief from comedian John Vlismas.

Hofmeyr leapt up at last, like a blue streak in his turquoise suit, grabbed Vlismas’s script, crunched it in his hand and pushed it into the comedian’s open mouth.

The audience took a gasp, but all-too briefly. And that was that. Hofmeyr, the torchbearer who could be the most dangerous white man in SA, had got away with it.

That’s the thing about the Afrikaner superstar. You want him to be stupid. You expect him to be stupid.

But he just isn’t.

In fact, Hofmeyr, as fans will see on the roast, won the night. From the moment he stepped off his throne on an oxwagon wheeled in with cheerleaders in tiny outfits, he was king. Nobody could touch him.

Read the full article on IOL here.