Le Big Bash

Why Tshepo Mahloele’s Lebashe has bought Tiso Blackstar’s media jewels.

- Jack Lundin

UNTIL IT BECAME SOUTH AFRICA’S latest media mogul in June, most people outside the fuliginous world of infrastructure project funding weren’t too familiar with Lebashe Investment Group (Pty). So what has propelled this well-heeled “unknown” down the path of print?

The answer, Noseweek can exclusively reveal, is General Bantu Holomisa. Tshepo Mahloele and his co-directors believe that their R1.05- billion purchase of Sunday Times, Business Day and Financial Mail, three of the country’s most iconic titles – not forgetting the rest of the sprawl of Tiso Blackstar’s media division extending into Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria – is their best shot to kill the war of words being waged against them by Holomisa and his UDM. A war that Lebashe director Warren Wheatley says “depicts us as greedy, unscrupulous and uncaring fat cats”; a never-ending campaign of “unfounded allegations” that, he claims, has caused incalculable damage to their reputations in their arena of financial services.

If buying a media empire seems an extreme way of combating an irritant like Bantu Holomisa, well, after its chairman raised $1bn (around R15bn) for trans Africa infrastructure, what’s a mere billion rand for a few ailing publications?

Holomisa has been on the warpath. In May and June last year he and his United Democratic Movement dispatched three letters to President Cyril Ramaphosa claiming to unmask the fleecing of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) by Lebashe and its fund-managing company Harith by “double or triple-dipping into the PIC’s funds” in more than a decade’s worth of alleged pillaging. The general repeated his charges to the Public Protector.