Africa-Press – South-Africa. NEARLY seven years after the fact, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), last week issued an unusual public censure to African Equity Empowerment Investments (AEEI) and its then sponsors, the PSG Group.
The censure revolves around a 2015 share deal with SAAB Grintek Defence in which AEEI’s then corporate sponsors, PSG, did not advise the company to inform its shareholders or seek their approval, for a R120 million share deal that included a call option.
The question, Dr Iqbal Survé, chairman of Sekunjalo Investment Holdings (SIH), a shareholder in AEEI, has asked, is why now, and why use his name to drive the headlines?
Commenting to Business Report, Dr Survé said he believes the JSE’s timing is all to do with the concerted effort by motivated parties and their ramped-up determination to terminate his various businesses.
This includes Independent Media, of which he is executive chairman, and the termination of banking facilities of several of the companies under the Sekunjalo umbrella.
“The censure of AEEI, warranted as it may be in terms of the JSE rules and regulations for listed companies, is somewhat suspicious in its timing many years after it happened. Not only that, but it has also once again stoked a slew of media reports that have deliberately misled their readers, used my name and image to generate eyeballs, and continue a pervasive misperception around me and the group,” Survé said in a statement yesterday.
Dr Survé is not a director of AEEI nor involved in its management. Nor was he, he confirms, at the time of the censured transaction either.
“I have to ask why the JSE decided to single AEEI out now and why it is that some of the media have made AEEI the focus of their articles, when it relied on the professional advice and input of its sponsors, who are culpable in this instance?”
Dr Survé also believed the JSE was jumping on the bandwagon to amplify negativity towards the Sekunjalo Group of companies.
This, he said, was with the aim of tarnishing the group’s reputation with the purpose of endorsing the termination of all the group companies’ banking facilities and cancelling its businesses, including Independent Media.
Dr Survé said Independent Media, as a voice for the majority of South Africans, was a critical cog in the wheel of reporting on the upcoming 2022 ANC conference, which will elect South Africa’s next president. Controlling that narrative was therefore critical, he said.
BUSINESS REPORT ONLINE
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