BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear

I first met George Bizos in 2004 as a candidate attorney at the Legal Resources Centre (LRC). He generously gave of his time to me and the many other candidate attorneys that passed through the doors of the organisation over the years. He would happily spend time discussing matters we were having difficulty with, offer training in trial advocacy and give us the opportunity to assist with matters h...

Former Eskom board member Venete Klein has implied that the cash-strapped power utility paying R18m to three executives, who were sent packing having done nothing wrong, was not a big deal. Klein was giving evidence at the commission of inquiry into state capture on Thursday. Her evidence was centred on the controversial departure from the power utility of three top executives in 2015. The executi...

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s question-and-answer session with journalists on Wednesday evening was a valuable exercise for the media and the public and hopefully also for the president. While Ramaphosa does a large number of public events and answers questions in parliament with regularity, taking questions from the press is an important part of accountability. Journalists — if they tak...

Taipei — Taiwan denounced China on Thursday over large-scale air and naval drills off its southwestern coast which it called a serious provocation and a threat to international air traffic. It urged Beijing to rein in its armed forces. China, which claims democratic Taiwan as its own, has stepped up military exercises near the island, in what Taipei views as intimidation to force it to accep...

Beirut — A large fire erupted at the Port of Beirut on Thursday, engulfing parts of the Lebanese capital in a pall of smoke weeks after a massive blast devastated the port and surrounding residential area. The blaze began in the shattered duty free zone of the port, prompting some residents to flee the city still traumatised by last month’s explosion. Army helicopters dropped water as...

It has taken decades for political parties opposing the ANC to come up with a defensible alternative policy that meets the challenges of our times. The past weekend saw the DA offer its considered counter to the ANC, but the policy’s birth has not been without considerable controversy. It followed in the wake of the departure from the party over recent months of important major black leaders...

Brussels — European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde said the surging euro must be monitored for its effect on prices, but she did not signal any pressing need to adjust monetary policy. The currency jumped to the highest in more than a week. Speaking after the ECB kept its pandemic bond-buying programme unchanged at €1.35-trillion and the deposit rate at -0.5%, Lagarde sa...

Zürich — UN secretary-general António Guterres has called for $35bn more, including $15bn in the next three months, for the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator programme to back vaccines, treatments and diagnostics against Covid-19. Some $3bn has been contributed so far, Guterres told an online event on Thursday, calling it “se...

SA Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) president John Dlamini died on Thursday morning after a short illness. The union said 53-year-old Dlamini, a police officer by training and service, was elected councillor at the borough of Howick municipality, which is now the Umgeni local municipality, in the early 1990s. Dlamini had also served as the council’s deputy council clerk. Years later, D...

Frankfurt/Berlin — Germany’s vice-chancellor has come under renewed pressure from lawmakers over his handling of two financial scandals, hurting his chances of reviving his Social Democrats in the race to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2021. Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat candidate for chancellor, gambled with the party’s centre-left identity by joining a grand coalition w...

I got to know George Bizos while working at the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) for almost a decade from 2008 to 2016. George himself had joined the LRC in 1991, spending almost three decades at the organisation. I joined the Constitutional Litigation Unit (CLU), where he was also based, as a junior attorney, then became an advocate and left as the unit’s director. George used to enjoy introduc...

The agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel to normalise their relations, described by some as a “peace” deal, seems to have hit a snag over weapons purchases. The UAE is keen to join the exclusive club of nations allowed to buy F-35 fighter jets; in exchange for allowing the transaction to proceed, Israel is seeking additional US weapon systems. For those with a long mem...

Washington — Applications for US state unemployment benefits held steady last week, in a sign that extensive job losses are persisting as the US struggles to control the coronavirus. Initial jobless claims in regular state programmes were unchanged at 884,000 in the week ended September 5, labour department data showed on Thursday. Due to a change in the methodology for seasonal adjustment e...

David Wolpert perhaps does not understand that the first objective of a political party should be to obtain power in parliament (“Why the anti-DA rhetoric? (", September 8). The second objective is to stay there. To obtain and keep power the party must craft a policy structure that appeals to the electorate. As Carol Paton cogently noted in the last three paragraphs of her article, the DA ha...

Brussels — Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi will no longer be invited to events of the European Parliament’s human rights prize, which she won in 1990, EU legislators said on Thursday, a protest over accusations of genocide in her country. Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner of Myanmar’s then ruling military junta in the 1990s who now rules as state counsellor, was awarded the pa...

Almost 40% of the R2.1bn spent by the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government on procuring personal protective equipment (PPE) and other goods and services as part of the response to Covid-19 was spent on African-owned companies. Premier Sihle Zikalala made these statistics available when he released a report on owners and directors of companies awarded Covid-19 contracts on Thursday. “Our analy...

On Tuesday afternoon the highest court in Switzerland, the Federal Supreme Court — the highest legal authority over World Athletics (formerly the IAAF) — delivered the judgment we’ve spent a year worrying about and waiting for. This latest ruling prevents Caster Semenya from defending her 800m gold medal title at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, unless she lowers her testosterone leve...

Boris Johnson won the last election in part because he could say on what terms he would leave the EU and his opponents could not. He had an “oven-ready” deal. Yet the agreement Johnson secured with the EU was one his predecessor, Theresa May, had rejected because it split Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK, placing the province in the regulatory orbit of Brussels. The prime minis...

The policy documents emerging from the DA are deeply impressive, all-encompassing and display an admirable application of intellectual minds within the party to generate a blueprint for economic growth and relative prosperity for SA. However, the party is more than a think-tank — it is a political establishment that should have as its primary objective to attract a majority of electoral supp...

Transport minister Fikile Mbalula revealed this week that 142 railway stations do not have electricity due to theft and vandalism. In Gauteng, cables and transformers have been stolen. The DA has been calling on Metrorail for a long time to improve security in and around its stations. It is unacceptable that commuters are left stranded because of cable theft and electricity infrastructure being va...

TRESemmé has explained that the images in the advert published by Clicks were not in line with the values of its brand or that of Clicks, and it is looking into how it happened and why it wasn’t picked up, and will take all necessary steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Unfortunately, this explanation probably needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Earlier this year TR...

It was predictable that the new DA policy decisions would be met either by expressions of doubt or howls of outrage. Carol Paton’s views express the former, with a leap into a chasm of misunderstanding (“DA now a party for some, not all, as new policy endorses denialism (”, September 8). This arises from viewing the adoption of nonracialism in isolation, without coupling it, as l...

I always enjoy reading Carol Paton’s articles and columns and don’t often disagree with her take on things, but I must take issue with her most recent article (DA now a party for some, not all, as new race policy entrenches denialism (, September 8). As a retired MD of a medium-sized company, I am well acquainted with the machinations of the ANC’s broad-based BEE policy, which, t...

I read with concern the article on banks, "Team Blue Wins, For Now" (Money & Investing, August 27-September 2) ( Two aspects stand out for me, and are seemingly overlooked or taken for granted. The first is the banks’ management of loans. Banks provide astronomical amounts of money to fund bad debts — Standard Bank R11.3bn and Absa R14.7bn, according to your article. Put aside the...

What a lovely column on the state of cricket according to the great bowler and sportsman Vince van der Bijl (“Players step into vacuum left by self-serving Cricket SA administrators (../columnists/2020-09-09-vince-van-der-bijl-players-step-into-vacuum-left-by-self-serving-cricket-sa-administrators/)”, September 9). Yes, cricket is a special case, and the advancement, running and admini...