STEPHEN CRANSTON: Long live RMI
Rand Merchant Investment Holdings is a good mix of businesses, and the underlying managers consider RMI to be a useful sounding board
My colleague Marc Hasenfuss recently called for the dismantling of the archaic Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) Holdings, a pyramid which controls FirstRand. I happened to be visiting Rand Merchant Investment Holdings (RMI) in Merchant Place, and its CEO, Herman Bosman, who is also the boss of RMB Holdings, which prefers to be known as RMH to avoid confusion with the merchant bank. He makes the point that when the RMB founders took over First National Bank (FNB), it was probably a better outcome than being sold to a foreign bank. It was better off with the wisdom and patience of GT Ferreira, Laurie Dippenaar and Paul Harris rather than, as Bosman puts it, the "in, out, shake it all about" style in which Barclays controlled Absa. These arguments used to be common in SA. At Anglovaal, for example, the Menells and Hersovs controlled an empire through a spider’s web of pyramid holding companies and N shares. Much of the time it had no independent directors, and it was a notoriously stingy divid...
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