Whee. The JSE All Share has set a new
record high. Well above 47 thousand. Our market has been among the most
ebullient on the planet. Buyers are elbowing each other aside in an effort to tempt
sellers to accept ever higher prices – especially for gold mining shares. Let’s
hope this ends well.
On
Monday a new and curious listing will appear on the JSE Oil and Gas producers
board with the name Camac Energy and share code CME. This company is already
listed on a small US
exchange with the ominous code CAK. Its business is to explore for and develop
oil and gas finds in Africa. The chairman and
CEO (often a worrying merger) is Dr Kase Lamal, who together with his family
seems to have a majority shareholding. Excellent sleuthing by reporters Brummer
and Woods of The Mail & Guardian have discovered that Dr Lamal arranged for
our very own President Jacob Zuma to receive an honorary doctorate of Humane
Letters from the Texas Southern University last year. But perhaps the really
alarming part is that the investment managers of the state pension fund have
taken a 34% stake in Camac for a total investment of USD 270m. A few quick
prods of the calculator keys reveals that if Camac should trade below about 785
cps on Monday the pensioners will already be underwater on that purchase. The
rest of us are probably best advised not to touch the thing with a barge pole.
Sasol is just so much better in that sector.
Unsurprisingly the national airline has again
pitched up at everyone’s front gate demanding money. They complain that one
reason why they are broke is that government tells them which routes to fly and
these includes spots to which no one except bureaucrats and politicians want to
go. Further concern for the taxpayers about the situation lurks in the chairman’s
claim that it should be recognised “…that SAA was turning its business around
with a history of nothing and an empty balance sheet.” This remark clashed
somewhat with the wonderful collection of historic pictures of earlier planes
in the SAA fleet that is doing the rounds as well as with the hope that the
balance sheet, while very unhealthy, should at least acknowledge the debts to
the fiscus of many billions. And to show that the managers at the state airline
seem to know as little about flying as the managers at the SABC know about
broadcasting, came the proposal for a reduction in flying hours required before
admission to the cockpit. This is not as scary as it sounds and merely proposes
that the trainee occupy a sort of jump seat behind the real pilot to see how
things are done. That this would increase flight crew costs by almost 50% was
not discussed.
Minister Gordhan delivers the 2014 Budget
speech next week. He has yet to find a way to fill the deficit caused by the
slump in revenue following the 2008/9 recession. There’s scant hope that he
will get any help from his colleagues, all of whom certainly have made plans to
spend even more of our money in the next year than ever before. We can
therefore reasonably expect him to announce increases in effective tax rates
and imposts. He may even have found something new to tax. How about oxygen?
He’s got one for carbon already.
The
pre-election rhetoric is full of assurances that the state’s program of
allocating resources using political criteria has been a great success and will
therefore be enlarged and more vigorously enforced. It is a great mystery that
all those who are determined to fix the world don’t pause for a moment and
consider that if it was possible for rules, laws and regulation to fix the world,
then it would surely have been accomplished a very long time ago.
The opening Super 15 matches produced
very satisfactory results for both the Lions and the Sharks. The groundsman at St George’s Park
in Port Elizabeth
seems to have prepared a wicket which has somewhat neutralised Mitchell Johnson,
the Australian bowler. The rains have arrived in Durban and ended a long spell of very hot
weather. It should be a good weekend.
James Greener
21st February 2014
