PRIVATE-PUBLIC PARTNERSHIP
Investors invited to help revive failed Eastern Cape tea estates
The Eastern Cape provincial government has issued a call to the private sector for expressions of interest in forming a public-private partnership to rescue two failed tea estates. Garth Voigt at IDEC Financial Services, which was charged with the business-rescue process, said on Wednesday that a definitive rescue depended on another financial injection from the provincial government. The two estates, Magwa and Majola, had been consolidated to facilitate the rescue. The provincial treasury said on Tuesday it had committed a further R116m to the rescue process, adding to the R20m the province’s rural development and agrarian affairs department had already spent on the effort. In 2015, the DA’s Eastern Cape leader, Athol Trollip, reported that the estates had by then received bail-outs of more than R200m following a decline in the domestic tea industry. "The question which kept cropping up was: where has all the money gone?" Farmer’s Weekly magazine reported Trollip as saying. The dec...
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