COMPANY COMMENT
Brait’s executive bailout has familiar ring to it
In 2018, shareholders of Steinhoff Africa Retail were told they would have to pay R500m to bail out executives who faced multimillion-rand liabilities linked to the Steinhoff share price
The announcement that Brait shareholders will be forced to cough up R2bn to bail out another executive incentive scheme, the members of which stood to gain hundreds of millions of rand of profit, may have a familiar and bitter feeling to it. In 2018, shareholders of Steinhoff Africa Retail (subsequently renamed Pepkor) were informed they would have to pay R500m to bail out executives who faced multimillion-rand liabilities linked to the Steinhoff share price. The year before, Shoprite shareholders were faced with the repurchase of R1.7bn worth of shares from former CEO Whitey Basson as the result of a little-known agreement that had existed between Basson and the company. The familiar thread through all of this is Christo Wiese, who is himself involved in a bid to persuade Shoprite shareholders to pay about R4bn for his Shoprite deferred shares. In the case of Pepkor the shareholders could take some comfort from the fact the executives had generated value and the collapse in the ...
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