Classic Business

Chris Holdsworth, chief investment strategist at Investec Wealth and Investment

Herman Botha, group general manager at retailer, PNA

Thapelo Montong, senior associate & patent attorney, Adams and Adams

Stephen Saad, CEO of Aspen Pharmacare

Nick Kunze, portfolio manager at Sanlam Private Wealth & Caroline Cremen, portfolio manager at Adviceworx

In the early 1990s, the police established the Organised Crime Intelligence Unit (OCIU) to investigate organised crime. This move gave detectives access to secret funding, safe houses, as well as agent and informant handling systems. A young Johann van Loggerenberg, who had just completed his national service in the police instead of the army, was approached to become a long-term deep cover agent for this unit.

As agent RS536, he took on the guise of a drug smuggler in the Durban underworld and slowly infiltrated different crime syndicates. His transformation was so complete that within a few years he became one of the top five most wanted individuals in KwaZulu-Natal. At the same time, the information he supplied to the OCIU led to several contraband busts and criminal convictions. But then his cover came under threat.

As a young policeman, Van Loggerenberg was given documents containing information on so-called third force activities - where Military Intelligence and the Security Branch supplied weapons to the Inkatha Freedom Party - which he shared with the Goldstone Commission. Disaster threatened when former members of the Security Branch, who had since joined the OCIU, got wind of this and accused him of being a spy. They threatened to discredit him to protect the old guard.

Michael Avery speaks to Johann van Loggerenberg, about his fourth book, Cop Under Cover. In it Van Loggerenberg describes his life with killers, drug lords and corrupt officials in vivid detail. This portrait of the criminal underworld also reveals the price he had to pay to lead a double life and how the struggle between the old and the new guard in the police continued for many years into the new democracy.

Raymond Parsons, from School of Business and Governance at North West University, Mathew Parks, parliamentary coordinator at Cosatu & Martin Kingston, deputy vice president of Busa

Deirdre Cooper, co-portfolio manager at Ninety One Global Environment Fund

Brian Armstrong, Professor in the Chair of Digital Business at the Wits Business School

The Brandfather with Jeremy Sampson, MD of Brand Finance Africa, rails against the decision to flush yet more taxpayer funds down the flying toilet that is SAA. The allocation was mainly funded through reductions to the baselines of national departments and their public entities, and provincial & local government conditional grants. The largest haircuts came from the Police and Higher Education ministries which shifted R1.2bn and R1.1bn, respectively. Other large funds were shifted from the departments of Human Settlement (R345m), Water & Sanitation (R200m), and Science & Innovation (R87m) among others. And Michael Avery and Jeremey discuss the GIFT report, which shines a rather unflattering light on the accounting profession. Accounting for the value in intangible assets such as brand, intellectual property, training, social license to operate and the like has for some time now been cause for robust debate. Accountants find comfort in the historical cost convention and writing down intangibles to avoid the pitfalls of so called creative accounting. But the problem with that approach in an age where, for example, many midmarket fintech companies have substantial EBITDA and profitability, while having the bulk of their assets as intangibles, produces accounting nonsense and misleading investor information.