A good week for MultiChoice chair Imtiaz Patel

A good week for Imtiaz Patel

Imtiaz Patel hasn’t looked back since he left a promising career as a cricket administrator and headed for the more lucrative world of sports television. Since then he has worked his way up the corporate ladder from SuperSport to become chair of MultiChoice, a position he recently yielded to Elias Masilela. However, he remained at the crease to chair the remuneration committee, which has decided to award him a bonus of almost R23m for shepherding the MultiChoice streaming service, Showmax, into a deal with Comcast to help it compete with the big guns such as Netflix.

A bad week for Ishmet Davidson

The end of printed newspapers has long been forecast, though the demise has been slow ... until Ishmet Davidson, group CEO of Media24, turned executioner last week. After prevaricating when the news broke, Davidson finally fessed up: Naspers, owners of Media24, would close the print titles of several iconic South African newspapers — Daily Sun, City Press, Rapport and Beeld among them. It’s especially tragic for a company that transformed itself from a political lackey into an innovative publishing business that was often ahead of the game in reporting and projecting its news. Putting it all online just won’t feel the same.