The Editor’s Desk: Truth and lies at Tongaat Hulett

Bruised from the Steinhoff debacle, South Africa is facing a fresh corporate scandal with the news that Tongaat Hulett has requested that its shares be temporarily suspended over concerns about the accuracy of the company’s published financial statements. While the Tongaat situation seems to be more a matter of poor judgement than intentional misbehaviour, for shareholders, the news is still bad. In this episode, Alec Hogg carefully lays out the details of the drama at Tongaat and explains what comes next for the company and its shareholders. It makes for grim listening. By all accounts, it will be many months before the tangled web of accounting issues is unravelled and shareholders are once again able to trade freely in the counter.