Transnet CEO Siyabonga Gama
Photo by: Duane Daws
Transnet CEO Siyabonga Gama revealed in Parliament on Wednesday that the South African parastatal intends to sue Futuregrowth Asset Management for damages.
Briefing Parliament’s portfolio committee on public enterprises, Gama said Transnet had written to Futuregrowth demanding an apology for its recent Statement that it was freezing lending to several State-owned companies it funds, including the rail and logistics company, because of concerns over governance and oversight issues.
“We have engaged with Futuregrowth, who have made those utterances, playing I think to the public gallery, instead of engaging us directly and probably also bending client confidentiality matters between a bank or a funder and a client,” said Gama.
“We have engaged with them in writing in terms of indicating that indeed what they said had the ability of moving the market and has had cost implications and we are preparing our Statement of claim in terms of that.”
Gama said they had asked Futuregrowth to retract their Statement regarding lending to Transnet and other parastatals.
“They need to apologise to Transent around these issues because there isn’t anything that Transnet is hiding. If they asked us whatever they needed to ask us we would have been able to engage with them on it, so we are not going to engage with them until they retract…,” he said.
At the same time, Gama assured MPs Transnet did not need Futuregrowth’s money.
“As far as we are concerned as Transnet, we have many sources of funding. There are many people who are willing to fund us,” he said.
“We don’t really know where their [Futuregrowth’s] pain came from in terms of what they had to say. We think that the utterances that were made were unfortunate and the utterances were not warranted.”