PETER BRUCE: Naspers has a state-capture problem that won't go away
'What the Naspers payments had done was to give state capture the cover of bogus TV and print media'
When you own more than 50% of a company you're in charge. You're responsible and you're accountable. Reading Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk's weasel explanation for Naspers's subsidiary, the pay-TV group MultiChoice, conniving with the Gupta family, you get the feeling that for Naspers, ownership simply implies you get most of the profits and that's where it ends.Naspers and MultiChoice are the latest establishment companies to get caught up in state capture in South Africa, along with auditors KPMG, software giant SAP andmanagement consultants McKinsey. It seems they paid the Gupta media businesses R25-million once off, then R50-million and possibly then even R150-million a year, to broadcast on the DStv platform we all know and love. They did that to protect their monopoly in encrypted TV, assuming, correctly as it turned out, that the Guptas had the political clout to circumvent official ANC policy, which was that our migration to a digital signal from the analogue one we have now shou...
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