Business

I haven’t had the luck or CV excellence to go to many interviews since I moved up to Cape Town. Truth be told, things are a bit laid back here and so in the absence of a job I’ve had to make ends meat by pursuing other inane part time work like data capturing, promoting, […]

Many a story abounds about the rapid emergence of Dubai as an economic powerhouse. In just 35 years, the country has morphed from a trading outpost to a unique duty-free shopping destination, from a beach holiday resort to one of the world’s busiest ports and dry docks, from a gold exchange to the premier financial […]

By Kim Polley What is in it for businesses and why should they invest in improving the environment and alleviating poverty? Companies in the private sector say they just want to do “the right thing” and “give something back” to the community. The sceptics on the other hand believe businesses are using these investments as […]

I wish I was an accountant. Really. If I were an accountant, I’d be like my cousin, who’s younger than me and drives a top-end Mercedes. He’s just bought a R3.5 million house, and that’s without having to sell the one he already owns. All because he did a BCom and became a CA. Speaking of […]

By Sanjeev Gupta UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently stated: “It is not just Wall Street or Main Street that is hurting; people with no streets are suffering too.” And amid all the turbulence that has engulfed the world of high commerce and haunted the major global economies, one can be forgiven for asking whether the […]

By Bevan Jones Two thousand odd years (give or take) is a long time to wait for things to change. Were the 60s the tipping point or are we now only entering this supposed golden age with the cracks in capitalism starting to appear? If we don’t hurry up even the hippies are going to […]

The Broccoli Project, the rewards programme for the poor that I wrote about recently, walked away with the 2nd prize in Hit Barcelona’s Global Entrepreneurship Competition this past week. Spanish company Bmat won first prize. The Broccoli Project also won the award for “best social value” walking away with total prize money of 25 000 euros […]

The Broccoli Project, an innovative scheme created by Marc Anthony Zimmerman, offers rewards to the poor in exchange for socially beneficial behaviour. Zimmerman, a successful social entrepreneur was inspired by CK Prahalad’s book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. He explains that while the rich are offered numerous incentives through reward schemes, there […]

There seems to be a deliberate pattern emerging in the approach being taken by the Frankel Investment Scheme suspects to the unfolding story of what appears to be South Africa’s largest Ponzi scheme. It appears to be to a deny everything strategy that puts the onus on investors (or victims) to prove their claims and […]

Many South African and overseas investors will soon be realising what many of them have probably been dreading for a while now, namely that the Frankel Investment Scheme, into which billions were poured, is nothing more or less than a vehicle designed to defraud them. Whether this turns out to be a classic “Ponzi”, along […]