NUMSA demands that Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan must stop sabotaging the sale of Mango airlines and finalize the deal!
15 December 2023
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) welcomes the humiliating defeat suffered by Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, after the North Gauteng High court denied him leave to appeal on the finalization of the sale of Mango Airways. The Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) applied for leave to appeal against a previous judgement, which ordered the minister to make a decision regarding whether the DPE supports the sale of Mango.
The judgement which was handed down on the 6th of September, gave Gordhan 30 days to confirm whether the sale can go through or not. If the sale goes through, Mango will be wholly owned by a private equity partner, and will no longer be owned by SAA and the DPE will cease to be the shareholder. But instead of implementing the order, Gordhan wasted tax payer money launching an application for leave to appeal. His application was dismissed with costs.
NUMSA was involved in this matter because we have members at Mango. Even though they have been retrenched, we negotiated with the Business Rescue Practitioner that workers at Mango would get preferential re-employment, when the airline takes off.
This case is a victory for the union because it protects the interests of our members and protects the future of the airline. Gordhan does not care that workers, the airline and the preferred bidder are in an indefinite limbo because of his reckless decisions. He is acting irrationally and he has no logical explanation for his behaviour.
Background
Mango Airlines has been grounded since July 2021 to date. An amended business plan was published by the Business Rescue Practitioner Sipho Sono on the 25th of November 2021. The revised business rescue plan was adopted on the on the 2nd of December by creditors with the supporting vote of more than 75% including SAA in terms of sections 152(2) and (4) of the Companies Act. SAA and DPE demanded that in the amended plan Mango must not be part of the SAA group.
They demanded that a private equity partner must be found and the BRP found the equity partner, but the DPE is refusing to make a decision to finalize the deal. It is DPE and SAA that insisted that Mango must be sold and they placed a condition that in order to release the R800 million needed to fund business rescue, the plan must be amended, and an equity partner must be found. Those conditions were met.
Pravin is attempting to sabotage the deal by delaying!
The decision to appeal the court judgement is just another attempt to sabotage the deal. DPE concocted a list of absurd reasons to justify the delay in taking a decision. The minister who has built his reputation on ‘corruption busting’ is deliberately wasting tax payer money on futile, costly and frivolous court applications, instead of making the decision to finalize the sale.
Gordhan is showing that he is a hypocrite. In the media he pretends to care about good governance, but his actions do not match up with his words. He is the most hostile minister to the working class. He has single handedly destroyed thousands of jobs. SA Express, SAA, Eskom, Transnet and Denel have all collapsed or are collapsing under his watch. He has a deadly ‘Midas touch’.
The only exception is that, unlike the fictional King Midas, whose touch, turned everything to gold, everything Pravin touches, dies an unnatural death. There is not a single entity under his portfolio which is doing well. He is managing the most strategic portfolio which is directly tasked with growing the economy, but his failures are destroying the economy.
It is clear from the latest court outcome that he is likely to lose at the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) if he tries to appeal there as well. NUMSA is demanding that he must stop wasting tax payer money and simply approve the sale of Mango.
Statement issued by Irvin Jim, NUMSA General Secretary, 15 December 2023
