Energy

5 important things happening in South Africa today

Staff Writer

 ·15 Jul 2022

Here’s what is happening in and affecting South Africa today:

• Urgent intervention needed: Business Unity South Africa has called for urgent intervention to address South Africa’s load shedding crisis, warning that the outages will lead to further negative growth, ratings downgrades and a deeper decline in consumer and investor confidence for many years to come. BUSA has urged the president to include in this plan clear direction and deadlines that reflect the seriousness and urgency of the situation. [BusinessDay]

• Greylisting: Standard Bank chief executive Sim Tshabalala has warned that South Africa’s potential greylisting by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) would be a worse than a credit rating downgrade for the country. Tshabalala said a greylisting will lead to further rand weakening, inflation will spike, interest rates will go up, and it will be more expensive to buy food, pay for petrol, buy homes, buy cars. [702]

• BEE changes: Lawyers have pushed back against a planned draft Black Economic Empowerment code aimed at transforming the country’s legal profession. In addition to stricter transformation rules the new code expect South Africa’s lawyers to perform hundreds of hours of free work every year. [Fin24]

• Electric cars: Mercedes-Benz says it is opposed to the government subsidising electric vehicles to make them more affordable in South Africa, but believes there should be parity between the import duties imposed on traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and EVs. The group noted that the import duty on ICE vehicles is currently 18%, while carmakers are expected to pay 25% on electric vehicles. [Moneyweb]

• Markets: The rand continued to weaken against the dollar on Thursday as it touched the weakest level seen since August 2020, driven by expectations that the US Federal Reserve could hike interest rates by 100 basis points later this month to combat soaring inflation. The rand is currently trading at R17.14/$, R17.20/€ and R20.27/£. The price of Brent crude oil today is $100.10/barrel. [Reuters]