President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday said Cabinet would consider several emergency power supply options at its meeting on Friday. He indicated during a briefing at Eskom's Megawatt Park head office that the power utility needed 5 000 MW of additional supply to help it address a deficit that has arisen as a result of the underperformance of its coal-fired power stations.
US investment bank Goldman Sachs has appointed Jonathan Penkin as head of its Johannesburg office, the bank's base for sub-Saharan Africa where the current chief executive is retiring at the end of the year. Penkin, who will relocate to Johannesburg, will be named CEO of Goldman Sachs International Bank, Johannesburg branch, pending regulatory approval, and Goldman Sachs International branch manager, the bank said in an internal memo sent on Tuesday.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has said that sabotage contributed to recent uninterrupted load-shedding. Ramaphosa is briefing the media on Eskom after cutting short an official visit to Egypt. The president said that while a number of factors contributed to recent rotational power cuts, including heavy rains, unplanned outages and the age of power stations, about 2 000MW of power was also lost due to an act of sabotage. Ramaphosa said the act of sabotage must be investigated, and Eskom must work with the police and intelligence services to find out what happened. He added that from December 17 to January 13 there would likely not be load-shedding. "All leave is cancelled. No one goes on leave," he said. The power utility called the briefing at its Megawatt Park headquarters in Johannesburg after days of rotational power cuts, including the unprecedented implementation of stage 6 load-shedding on Monday evening, which forced mines countrywide to bring underground operations to a halt.
South Africa's biggest money manager has written to 22 gold mining companies asking them to disclose data on the emissions they cause, adding to pressure on the resources sector to tackle climate change. Investec Asset Management, which manages around £111-billion, including over $1-billion in gold assets, wants companies to disclose emissions data across their supply chain, a letter to one of the companies seen by Reuters showed.
South Africa must move quickly to implement the reforms needed to salvage its status as an investment destination and breathe life into the struggling economy, a senior banker said. “South Africa is rapidly becoming a forgotten country and has stopped being talked about as an investment destination,” James Formby, the CEO of FirstRand’s Rand Merchant Bank, wrote in Johannesburg-based newspaper Business Day. “It’s no longer five to midnight, it is midnight. We cannot afford to wait any longer to turn things around.”