Mailbox: Business at any cost: A personal battle against corporate corruption in SA

Key topics:Decades of pressure to accept unethical business practicesBribery, tax schemes, and corruption resisted at personal costCulture of “business at any cost” dominates corporate SA.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Corporate Cassandra*.Just been watching the last episode of Steinheist and I wrote then deleted this email twice as it serves little purpose besides being interesting and I’m sure you are well aware of all this. Whilst the Steinhoff scale is immense, the propensity of SA business to unethical behaviour lends itself to business people behaving as Jooste did.As a senior executive and subsequent business owner (sold and retired) for over 35 years, I was repeatedly made to feel that my “female” aversion to unethical practise made me an inferior business person. In one instance, I was replaced (with a good payoff and the excuse of BEE) months before the business was bought by a South African asset management company. I was known at a futures trading platform as the “moral compass of the company”. Was it done deliberately? I have speculated many years. In another instance, as a young executive (I had set up a shipping company in South Africa for a transportation company), I was party to a board discussion on the purchase of luxury cars for a South African businessman to facilitate the license for hotels in homelands. In another, I adamantly refused to pay bribes for landing freight for a shipping company in Zimbabwe - our competitors were being issued licenses before we had through bribes. I recall discussing price fixing in the packaging industry with a senior exec in that industry and his attack on how naive I was to suggest he shouldn’t do this - “you’re not a business person” I was told. My experience, which I previously relayed to you, regarding a business executive and myself refusing to pay a bribe for a tech business deal at a South African telecommunications company relates. As CEO of a tech startup, our funding was withdrawn by a very prominent business shortly after I refused to set up a convoluted tax structure, so complex as to to confuse the smart individuals setting it up - they tried to force me to sign off on it. As an exec in an international tech company the CEO refused to allow the CFO access to any accounting information and tried to force him to sign it off without sight - he did. I however went to battle and handed in my notice as a result of ongoing misrepresentation which was unbearable. And on and on. That is my limited personal experience and in all that time, very seldom, did anyone take a stand with me. That is what business in SA has been about for years - business at any cost. I wonder how many of those big corporate execs are cringing right now - or do they sleep comfortably as Jooste did in his heyday..*Corporate Cassandra is a nom de plume, drawn from the Greek myth of Cassandra, fated to utter true warnings that went unheeded, used to protect the author’s identity. For confidentiality, certain names of individuals and companies have also been replaced.

Mailbox: Business at any cost: A personal battle against corporate corruption in SA

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