Apologies for yesterday’s unexpected break. Gauteng’s Third Wave has taken down pretty much our entire Joburg team – physically, we’re all managing well, but it has been disruptive to the business processes.
Perspectives change when things become personal, and for a growing number of South Africans the pandemic has now become intensely so. Not surprisingly, many are increasingly anxious to understand how it all originated,
Unfortunately we may never be completely satisfied on this score.
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China’s approach has been to block any attempt to access information that would help the global community uncover the root cause.
Latest is the removal from a US database of critical gene sequencing data on the early Wuhan victims. The Chinese scientist who submitted the data – and thus is also entitled to remove it – gave no reason when instructing its expunging three months later.
Also for your reading list –Â
* The 12J tax incentive window closes on Wednesday. Yesterday I hosted the last of our 12J webinars, this time with Leor Atie of Lucid. The focus was on Lucid’s 12J Retirement Fund, a low risk project targeting an effective 20% pa return with an option, also, of converting the maturing investment into a life right at one of the fund’s upmarket retirement homes.
* The leak to ProPublica of tax information on wealthy individuals has claimed another high profile victim. This time Peter Thiel (above), who made his billions alongside Elon Musk in PayPal and Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook. Thiel has been campaigning for higher wealth taxes – but his own billions, the IRS info shows, are shielded in a tax-free scheme.
* Not a good day, either, for Rudy Giuliani, the former New York Mayor and keynote speaker at Discovery’s 2010 Leadership Summit in Sandton. Giuliani will be needing to get back onto the speaker circuit ASAP after having his law licence suspended for issuing “demonstrably false and misleading statements.”
* On the investment front, US president Joe Biden negotiated another massive spending injection for the world’s largest economy, this time $1trn for transport, water and broadband infrastructure. It’s not a done deal however. His bipartisan proposal now needs to be shepherded through the 50-50 Senate and the Democrat’s narrowly controlled House.
