JAMIE CARR: The rand has finally started to eat its spinach
After many years of imitating the 90-pound weakling and getting sand kicked in its face, the rand has finally started to eat its spinach
A run for the money While a few local fund managers have come forward to point to the absence of Steinhoff in their portfolios, that company’s collapse certainly came as more of a shock to the market as a whole than the demise of Carillion, the UK’s second-largest construction company. Carillion has been described as a slow-motion train crash. It won the distinction of being the most shorted company in the FTSE 350 as long ago as the spring of 2016, with almost a quarter of its shares out on loan to vultures. Carillion’s share price had been on a downward trend since 2014, but it really went into full Stuka mode last July, when the company announced a cheeky £845m of write-downs on hospital contracts in Birmingham and Liverpool, the Aberdeen bypass and contracts in Canada, Oman and Qatar. The Qatari project being built ahead of the 2022 World Cup has been particularly damaging, with £200m of cash being trapped and the Qatar Foundation resolutely refusing to get out the chequebook on...
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