A good week
The market’s clearly taking a wait-and-see approach to Sibanye-Stillwater’s desire to buy two new mines — nickel sulphide and copper-gold operations, both in Brazil — but we cannot fault the enterprise of CEO Neal Froneman. His deal-making is becoming pretty legendary, buying platinum and palladium assets at the worst point in the cycle and picking up metal assets that may prove crucial in the green energy transition. Let’s hope that vaulting ambition — always helped by a dose of luck — pays off this time too.
A bad week
You’ve got to admire the brazen bullyboy tactics of the tweeting engineer, Matshela Koko. In the midst of his lawsuit against the FM’s former deputy editor Sikonathi Mantshantsha for "defamation", evidence has emerged that he may indeed have tried to cook Eskom’s books, which handily explains the until now inexplicable improvement in generating performance the power utility’s clearly wilting plants put out during his tenure as CEO. If hot air were an Eskom input, we’d be home and dry.