Investing in Iqbal"Doc" Survé’s business has been toxic for the Government Employees Pension Fund , thanks to the PIC’s betrayal of its mandate to look after civil servants’ retirement money – a betrayal led by former PIC chief executive"Dr Dan" Matjila.
New details have also emerged concerning the dire fate of the PIC’s separate earlier investment in Independent News and Media SA , the newspaper group purchased by Survé’s consortium in 2013 with PIC backing.circumstances, taking up a pre-listing share offer of nearly 100 million shares at R43 per share, when the Net Asset Value of the company was only 15 cents per share.
Negotiations over this so-called"downside protection agreement"dragged on until 16 October 2018, when Matjila signed the contract, whose final version had not been made public until now.The downside protection agreement is now at the centre of a market manipulation investigation launched by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority .
Both are challenging the search warrant which authorised an FSCA raid on 9 October this year on the premises of Sekunjalo and AEEI, during which the companies’ computer servers were duplicated.It shows that Survé utterly dominated the trade in Ayo shares and sets out the FSCA’s case that he artificially propped up the Ayo share price.
The FSCA suspects the trading was done to prevent the share price from falling below the threshold agreed with the PIC, set at R22 per share in the 16 October contract – a price that already represented a 49% loss on the R43 per share that the PIC paid – and slightly below the R25 per share where the share was hovering at the time.
First up, in his affidavit challenging the FSCA search warrant, Abdulla argues the Ayo downside agreement never came into force at all.