“Rogue campaign” killed SAA deal, says Gordhan

Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan has lashed out at the chair of the portfolio committee on public enterprises, Khaya Magaxa, after the latter called for the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) to investigate the SAA deal.

According to a Sunday Times report, Gordhan accused Magaxa of “playing to the public gallery” and “politicising a parliamentary process that is supposed to be free of any influence.”

“Magaxa appears instead to have gone on what increasingly looks to be a rogue campaign to accuse and convict the DPE, and by extension minister Pravin Gordhan, of impropriety without a shred of verifiable evidence,” said Gordhan’s spokesperson Elias Mnyandu.

Mnyandu also claimed that Magaxa had gone “beyond his mandate” by “sidestepping the legal opinion of parliament’s own legal adviser.”

Parliament’s legal adviser had said there were no signs of corruption in the deal, but Gordhan has accused Magaxa of seeing fit to “conflate issues by entertaining new lies.”

“In essence, Mr Magaxa has turned a legitimate oversight exercise into a kangaroo court at which the DPE and its staff have been slandered, denigrated and pilloried for the sake of politicking,” said Mnyandu.

SAA sale cancelled

Gordhan’s comments follow the decision to cancel a deal to sell a majority stake of SAA — 51% — to the Takatso consortium for R51.

The National Treasury claimed it had never been consulted at the time of negotiations and argued that the terms of the deal were skewed heavily towards the buyer.

Gordhan also said in a statement at the time that while a valuation of SAA’s business and assets had been reached three years ago, circumstances have since changed — COVID-19 is no longer inhibiting travel, and the state of the economy is vastly different.

“The business came out now at a value of R1 billion and the property went up to about R5.5 billion which meant that any negotiations on this transaction would have to take into account the new valuations that have emerged,” said Gordhan.

SAA will now revert to being 100% owned by the South African government.

“We are convinced that SAA can sustain itself in the next year to 18 months, and that there are various other ways in which immediate financing can be obtained,” said Gordhan.

“But at no stage will SAA get money from the fiscus.”

Mango sale proceeds

SAA is busy offloading its budget airline, Mango, to a private entity.

Mango has been grounded since it entered business rescue in July 2021 and was identified as a property that SAA could offload to streamline its operations.

“The market definitely needs Mango to make a return,” said Mango business rescue practitioner Sipho Sono.

There are currently three notable budget airlines — Airlink, Lift, and FlySafair — with far less capacity on cheap flights than before the pandemic.

Mango will give consumers more choice, potentially lowering budget flight prices in South Africa.

However, Sono has yet to provide a timeline on when Mango could return to the skies.

“There is quite a lot of work to be done before we can announce timelines. We will announce in due course,” Sono said.