BizNews Radio

It’s been an unusually tumultuous time in South Africa - even by our standards - after former spyboss Arthur Fraser spilled the beans on Cyril’s couch. That sort of red tomatoey mess doesn’t easily come out of upholstery - but if Fraser’s affidavit to police is to be believed - something that does wash out quite easily is anywhere between $4m and $8m. The megaphone for the ANC's Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction - Carl Niehaus - wants Ramaphosa to be apprehended through a citizen's arrest and taken to the "closet police station".

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Victoria Ashwin talks to Peter Hayward-Butt, CEO of Ethos Capital, about Brait’s latest reported earnings results. Ethos is contracted by Brait as an investment advisor over a 4-year period that started in March 2020. Its advisory fee is approximately R100m per annum and also has a shareholding in Brait of 12.3% which indicates that skin in the game is delivering positive results. We also discuss the value that long-term shareholder Christo Wiese brings to the table and how Virgin Active plans to grow post-COVID with a fresh capital injection of $88.4bn. Furthermore, Premier looks to be building on robust growth despite inflationary and input cost pressures whilst New Look, the UK fashion brand, has also managed to show healthier results with revenue up 58% to GBP875m.

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BizNews spoke to Dr Georgina Pujol-Busquets Guillén, who did her PHD in the effect of a low-carbohydrate nutrition education program on dietary choices and metabolic health in women from low-income South African communities. Dr Pujol-Busquets succinctly explained the findings of her study and the deteriorating metabolic health of SA's rural women due to their incorrectly propagated diet.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way that people work overnight with many workers keen to continue with working from home. It has also prompted a new look at the five-day work week and whether we can be as productive in a four-day week. In the world’s biggest trial, 70 UK companies have started experimenting with a 32-hour week and they are being monitored by the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Boston College in the US to see whether productivity can be maintained in shorter hours. The Campaign Director of the 4 Day Week pilot is Joe Ryle, who told BizNews.com that working five days or for 40 hours a week is a very outdated model of work that hails from the 1930s and is causing stress and burnout. Ryle hopes that the campaign will have a domino effect and travel across the world to countries like South Africa.

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Billionaire Patrice Motsepe is said to be putting his money where his mouth is in seeking to bridge divides in South Africa, not only between white and black, but between established commercial farming and emerging farmers, in particular. The Motsepe Foundation and Agri SA have come together with the shared goal of improving the agricultural sector by making R70m available for two specific projects. The initial projects chosen include a sugar cane joint venture in Mpumalanga between traditional communities and consumer giant RCL Foods. The other is a citrus farming project in Limpopo. Soft loans with low interest rates will be offered. BizNews caught up with Motsepe and Agri SA Enterprises CEO Omri van Zyl on the sidelines of the launch of the initiative.

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Of 300 000 public responses to proposed regulations, Department of Health officials read just 132 – and completely ignored the fact that 97% of the submissions were against them. The regulations propose indefinitely imposing mask-wearing; need to provide vaccination certificates for access into SA and large gatherings; and the capping of audiences in public facilities to 50% of capacity. In addition, now public emails by DDG Dr Nicholas Crisp confirm official disdain of the consulting cornerstone of the SA democratic process. In this interview with BizNews founder Alec Hogg, Sakeliga’s Russell Lamberti and Tian Alberts unpack disclosures laid bare after the court forced the DOH to hand over 20GB of data files to its court opponent.

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The media landscape has been flooded with soundbites, images, video footage and interviews narrating the undeniable tragedy that continues to unfold in Ukraine. But that deluge of information - in South Africa anyway - has been mostly from Ukrainian and English-speaking Western media outlets. BizNews editor Michael Appel sat down with Alexander Arefiev, press attaché of the Russian Embassy in Pretoria, to get the justification and motivation behind what Russia continues to call its “special military operation” in Ukraine which began on 24 February.

This interview is on the back of several articles and interviews BizNews has done with Ukrainian officials. Our interview with the Ukrainian Ambassador to South Africa, Liubov Abravitova, can be read here. 

To watch the recent interview with Ukrainian member of parliament and chairperson of the committee on Ukraine's integration into the EU, Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, click here.

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Currently, there are both more gyms, and higher obesity levels, than ever before. Something is definitely amiss. The low carbohydrate, high fat diet (LCHF) has been put forward as an antidote to diabetes and other health issues. To delve into LCHF, BizNews spoke to two highly esteemed doctors: Dr Mark Cucuzzella, a professor at West Virginia University School of Medicine and an advocate for nutritional science, and Dr Eric Westman, an Internal Medicine Doctor and Obesity Specialist who has been an authoritative source on low-carb/keto diets for over 20 years. Both experts provide meaningful insight into LCHF, into concerns that fat makes you fat, on diabetes remission and more.

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In this interview with Dr Tro Kalayjian – an obesity medicine physician who is the medical director and founder of Dr Tro’s Medical Weight Loss and Direct Primary Care in New York – he explains the benefits of the LCHF (low-carbohydrate, high-fat) diet so simply that our country’s failure to provide its citizens with a basic nutritional education is quite blatantly deplorable. In case anyone requires additional encouragement to listen to what Dr Tro has to say, he used to weigh 350 pounds! Naturally, he sought guidance from his expert medical peers – none of whom found a sustainable way for him to shed his excess weight. LCHF, however, managed to do the trick.

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Victoria Ashwin and Sean Peche, portfolio manager and founder of Ranmore Global Equity Management discuss recent global market movements which have left a lot of investors spooked with the S&P down 8.9% in the past 5 days.

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