South Africa Car Hire

CAPE TOWN - Little more than ten days ago, one of the court-appointed curators of Fidentia Holdings, Dines Gihwala, stood in front of a packed meeting room addressing Fidentia's Cape Town and Johannesburg staff. He promised all people present (and listening via a live video-conference link) that their jobs were secure and that his office door would remain open for all concerns and questions.

Yet within just five days Gihwala curtly told the Cape Town canteen manager that both her and her team of seven canteen and cleaning staff were no longer needed. Each one of those people, amongst Fidentia's lowest-paid employees face an uncertain future and will return as former breadwinners to the extended families who have depended so heavily on them up to this time.

At the centre of the Fidentia curatorship is a sum of somewhere between R400m and R600m as yet unaccounted for, which is part of an original amount invested with Fidentia Asset Management (FAM) through Living Hands trust, the administrator of the savings of about 47 000 widows and orphans – the families of deceased mineworkers.

While the jury is out on what exactly has happened to all the money, and while former mineworkers' families are considered amongst South African citizens most deserving of protection, the methods and manners of the new Fidentia curators seem harsh at best.

I am one small voice writing from within the so-called “opulent” (as Bruce Cameron has put it) offices of Fidentia's Canal Walk headquarters. Since Monday last week, I have been asking the curator to sign off two simple documents that would confirm that employee benefits invested in an external staff benefits saving plan are safe. On Friday last week, Gihwala asked if I had nothing better to do all day than sit around and demanded that I leave his office suite. When I explained that I was “sitting around” waiting for his reply to a formal request, he seemed to grow angrier and more indignant. My ego bruised, I left soon after. Needless to say, no replies to my polite queries were offered.

What has emerged over the past ten days is that Gihwala's “open door” remains firmly closed to any request by Fidentia staff for some clarity on their futures. Will they be paid a February salary? Nobody knows. If retrenched, what about benefits? Nobody knows. If, by Gihwala's own assurances, Fidentia Group's subsidiary companies are operating at “business as usual” status, why have so few people been communicated with?

Why, on Friday February 9, were some members of senior management issued with notices of intended retrenchment scheduled to commence Monday February 12? Included in that list of individuals are two personal assistants who have been working closely with the joint curators and their teams since February 1 when the curatorship process commenced. One of these women, who has personally ordered and collected meals for the curators' teams (remember, the canteen is now closed) is expecting her first baby in about a month's time. She was told that any benefits and severance pay owing to her, when she leaves, are unlikely at this stage.

I am certainly not attempting to cry over spilt milk here. But the fact remains that more than 1 000 employees of the Fidentia group of companies are, in the majority, amazing people who would never condone or allow widows and orphans to be robbed of hard-earned savings.

I count it a rare privilege to have met and worked alongside phenomenal individuals such as world-class disabled wheelchair athlete Ernst van Dyk. This man, who regularly ranks within the top five wheelchair positions at the Boston, New York, London and Japan marathons, is an amazing and inspiring human being. The international media treat him with both respect and attention. Yet our local media are glaringly silent or inattentive to his inspiring story. But the moment the Fidentia story broke, his phone was ringing off the hook and when he referred any comment to official Fidentia sources, was rewarded with his good name splashed in a cover story on Cape Town's latest financial scandal. While training on Paarl's roads for upcoming race events, he has already been harassed and verbally abused.

Similarly, on the day Moneyweb ran a story by Alec Hogg titled “Fidentia: It's our worst nightmare'” (Thursday February 8) I was met with the enraged and deeply hurt reaction of one of South Africa's cricketing greats, Meyrick Pringle. In his article, Hogg (who seems incapable of spelling Meyrick's name correctly) originally wrote: ' 'Brown and his cronies – retired cricketers Eric Simons, Dave Callaghan and Merrick [sic] Pringle are among the "employees" – have looted the Living Hands trust, previously worth R1,2bn, almost to the point of extinction.' And later in the same article Hogg writes, 'His [Arthur Brown's] obsession with sporting fame stretched beyond the employment (at six figure monthly salaries) for new best friends like Simons, Pringle, Callaghan and Louis Koen, through to headline sponsorship of the Boland provincial rugby team, the Manning Rangers soccer club and the Eastern Province Warriors cricket team.'

I should use the verb form 'Hogg wrote' because after concerned calls from the sports personalities targeted, Hogg altered the online article later to soften the implied guilt by association but has yet to offer any correction or apology.I also see that Moneyweb's Jackie Cameron has added an interesting piece this morning (February 12 2007) titled “Where is Mrs Arthur Brown?'” and claiming: “Cape Town's pole-dancing queen, wife of Arthur, does a disappearing trick.”

I seriously doubt that any employee wants to do a bad job and the majority of colleagues I feel privileged in my time at Fidentia to have met are good, hard-working and caring people. What many members of the media seem to intentionally disregard is that their words, carefully selected and honed for the butchering task at hand, can be agents of healing and reassurance or instruments of clinical destruction. Does any one of them care about the good people affected in this story or are the innocents on the inside ignored as victims of collateral damage?

In the past ten days it seems that the Fidentia curators are being neither open nor transparent in their dealings with staff. Despite frequent appeals for information and updates with which to build and motivate staff members to remain focused and ensure that work life is indeed “business as usual”, Gihwala sits in Mr Brown's opulent office and says nothing. A small correction: Gihwala does find the time at least once a day to update key members of the media. He is quoted often in media reports on the unfolding Fidentia story and its employees can only hope to read about their uncertain futures in the daily papers. A small question still lingers in the minds of many employees who will still arrive at work even while facing the fear of retrenchment. If the money is indeed all gone, will the widows and orphans also be paying for the curatorship fees when this matter is finally laid to rest?

Ross Edwards works for Fidentia and has given us his approval to run this piece.

PS – Alec Hogg writes: My sincere apologies for misspelling Meyrick Pringle’s name. Also, the wording of the initial piece could have been better. But it was changed within a couple of hours to the way it reads now.

Article from http://www.moneyweb.co.za/
It's sad that the guys at the top are still going to walk out of this, and the people who did a job will suffer.

Labels: South Africa - crime