Businerss Day logo, smaller.jpg Government to provide R550bn to support black industrialists Penelope Mashego, Business Day, Johannesburg, 1 June 2016 The government will provide R550bn in support of black industrialists, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said on Tuesday evening. Davies was speaking at a briefing following a Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Advisory Council meeting at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. The programme "has received 107 applications and many of those have been scrutinised, some of those have been sent back for further particulars but five approvals have already been made", he said. He said the funding would be made up of capital support and incentive grants. The programme is meant to support black entrepreneurs and give them a leg up as the government works towards transforming the economy. The acting commissioner for the broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE) commission, Zodwa Ntuli, also submitted a report at the meeting, which was chaired by President Jacob Zuma. She said fronting continued to be a thorn on the side of the government, which was the reason her office was established last year. "Already we've received about 33 complaints and 22 of those are purely on fronting," she said. Ntuli said the commission's preliminary investigations showed that there was merit in the complaints. She said some of the complaints came from people who had not received any benefits from the B-BBEE transactions they had been part of. "It's very broad, it's not that thing of a person taking a gardener and making the gardener look like they are a director. It's bigger than that, it's where you are a shareholder and you are a really serious shareholder in the company, but you don't get your dividends, your dividends are diverted somehow," she said. Ntuli said the penalties for fronting included a fine of up to 10% of the company's turnover, and 10 years imprisonment. Other penalties include exclusion from doing business with the government for up to 10 years and the offending company's contracts being cancelled. She also said the consultation on the 2013 B-BBEE Amendment Act was complete and the commission now had power to begin investigations. This means that the amendment act will take precedence over any other law that was in force before the date of the commencement of the act. BEE lobbyists and business people have been calling for the trumping clause to be enforced and for the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act to be scrapped, saying it would be easier to solve the BEE problems of companies with the clause. From: http://www.bdlive.co.za/business/2016/06/01/government-to-provide-r550bn-to- support-black-industrialists -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
