Intu should come clean about its plans

Intu Properties’ management is not doing itself a favour by avoiding SA’s media and investors while its fate lies in the balance.

The group — which owns interests in 17 malls in the UK, a mall in Spain’s capital, Madrid, and a development opportunity along that country’s southern coast — is desperate for yet another credit reprieve as it tries to manage suffocating debt of about R100bn.

This week it said that it had lined up advisory firm KPMG as administrator in a contingency measure in case financial restructuring talks with its lenders failed.

Intu, which was formed out of the late billionaire Donald Gordon’s Liberty International 10 years ago, said that on Friday it will ascertain if its creditors are willing to waive terms on £600m (R12.9bn) of loans until the end of next year.  

The company is run by CEO Matthew Roberts, who was appointed to its board on June 3 2010 and worked as the group’s CFO from 2010 to 2019. He became CEO on April 29 2019.

But in May it also appointed a chief restructuring officer, David Hargrave. The idea was that he would help Intu to sell secondary Spanish and British malls, which could help to ease pressure on Intu’s balance sheet.

Yet attempts by Business Day to interview both Roberts and Hargrave in 2020 have been fruitless.

The two are understandably under a lot of pressure as they try to save the UK’s largest shopping centre chain.

If anything, Intu’s management should be approachable to media even if it is to say that it will shut malls, delist from exchanges and no longer exist as it once did. Many South Africans have backed this group and seen its executives handsomely rewarded. Now, they need to be honest and transparent as they try to cling to whatever managerial credibility is left.  

Telecom operators, in co-operation with competition authorities, have done much to help lower the cost of accessing the internet through zero-rated data services.

With Vodacom and MTN having reduced the price of their mobile data by more than a third as of April, there’s no doubt that the SA consumer is much better off than a year ago.

That said, there are certain services that the Competition Commission has deemed as essential, such as education, health and government websites, which have largely become free to access across networks.

While the developments are good, there seems to be no uniform list of sites and services to be zero-rated. The main network operators offer free access to different lists of sites.

There are common ones, but if one thinks of pupils in a class, the problem becomes more obvious. During this time of socially distanced learning, if a class has to access an online resource zero-rated by one network operator but not another, access becomes unequal as one group may or not be able to afford the service.

For pupils who have unlimited internet access at home or school this may not be an issue, but for a large part of the SA population it is.

Some networks have struck deals with institutions — as MTN has done with Wits University, where learners get an allocation of data to access any site. That’s a good solution, but how do you police what the data is used for? 

On the whole, zero-rating is good for South Africans, who are already strained financially. But a more unified approach to which sites are essential — perhaps led by the state — is necessary.