There is a wonderful trick in corporate life. When a company gets into trouble, the shareholders who provided the money and the creditors who lent it somehow remain attached to the corpse while the useful bits develop legs and wander off elsewhere.
Something remarkably similar appears to be happening at Independent Media. In case you haven’t been following the saga closely, and there is no reason you should have been, the past few weeks for the owners of the once mighty, now minuscule, daily newspapers the Cape Times, The Star and The Mercury, and 14 other titles, have been interesting.
When Independent Media bought the old Independent Newspapers group in 2013, the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), investing the pensions of government employees, ended up owning 25%. Chinese investors, through Interacom, owned another 20%. The investment company of the Southern African Clothing & Textile Workers Union (Sactwu) lent R150m to help finance the purchase. The remaining 55% was owned by Sekunjalo Independent Media (SIM), controlled by controversial businessman Iqbal Survé.
There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then; the newspapers now have circulations appropriate for printing on a desktop printer. But there was a bizarre twist last month. Sekunjalo announced it was ending its financial support for Independent Media. Shocker. It was washing its hands of its own asset!
But it also disclosed something rather important: Independent Media did not own the newspaper mastheads it had been publishing. The licences to use these titles — including the Cape Times, The Star and The Mercury — were terminated. Sekunjalo said the titles could be licensed elsewhere.
And presto, they were. The newspapers suddenly reappeared under something called National Media Group (NMG), using mastheads licensed by Sagarmatha Technologies, another company in the broader Sekunjalo orbit.
So what, exactly, are the PIC and the Chinese investors left owning? Not much. Sekunjalo itself has questioned why Sactwu is spending so much on litigation against the Independent Media Consortium, the acquisition vehicle, which it says effectively has no assets and no realistic prospect of satisfying the claim. The PIC, the Chinese investors and Sactwu have apparently been royally screwed.
Sactwu has had to travel through the courts for years to simply try to enforce its loan. This month the Constitutional Court refused SIM’s application for leave to appeal. That left standing a Supreme Court of Appeal judgment in March this year, which held SIM liable to Sactwu Investments Group for, according to SIM, R300m.
Just a few days before the Constitutional Court’s decision was handed down, NMG announced that Sagarmatha Technologies had granted it licences to publish the 17 titles formerly published by Independent Media. Amazing!
But here is the problem. NMG itself isn’t really a brand-new company. Corporate records examined by Daily Maverick show it was incorporated as “K2019436141 (South Africa)” in August 2019 and was renamed National Media Group on April 14 2026. And until July its sole listed director was Lizaan Nel — simultaneously company secretary of Sagarmatha, Independent Media and Independent Newspapers. Its registered address is the Survé Family Office address at the V&A Waterfront. Sekunjalo has acknowledged having a financial interest in NMG but hasn’t disclosed the full ownership structure.
There is another problem. Sagarmatha was supposed to be the group that was going to list as a media company with the support of the PIC in 2018, but that never happened. However, according to the pre-listing statements, Sagarmatha did not own Sekunjalo’s 55% at the time. The whole point of the proposed 2018 transaction was that Sagarmatha would acquire SIM and thereby obtain its indirect 55% interest in Independent Media. The prospectus says this explicitly.
The 2018 prospectus contains the audited consolidated accounts of SIM for 2014–2016. Those accounts are particularly revealing. They identify the newspaper mastheads as intangible assets. In 2015 they had a carrying value of about R1.02bn, impaired by R195.04m in 2016 to R827.9m.
Now the legal problems. Section 112 of the Companies Act says that a company generally can’t dispose of all or the greater part of its assets or undertaking without shareholder approval by special resolution under section 115, and the assets involved have to be fairly valued. How did the mastheads suddenly become the property of Sagarmatha and what was paid for them? And did the minority shareholders collectively approve the “sale”?
We don’t know this, but I am just going to hazard a wild guess and say they didn’t. Why would they? If the PIC and/or the Chinese voted against the special resolution, if there was one, NMG’s claim to the mastheads would be legally void. Of course, NMG could just come forward and show the documentation, but so far it has not done so.
The Financial Sector Conduct Authority has a case pending against Survé’s other company, Ayo Technology Solutions, for market manipulation that now dates back seven years. It’s ridiculous. When I see this stuff, I can’t understand why South Africa has been taken off the Financial Action Task Force greylist.
Justice delayed is justice denied. But in corporate South Africa, justice delayed can also mean somebody else has already left with the furniture.
