3 South African billionaires who donated their fortune to charity
Billionaires globally are joining the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in pledging to donate their fortunes to philanthropic causes – and several South African billionaires have done the same in recent years.
Jannie Mouton
Earlier this week billionaire Jannie Mouton donated R1.072 billion ($82 million) in PSG Group shares to his personal charity, the Jannie Mouton Foundation.
Founder and chairman of PSG Group, Mouton was earlier this year listed as the newest dollar billionaire in South Africa by Forbes in its annual Billionaire List for 2017.
Mouton, known as the “Boere Buffett” for his successes on the stock market, founded PSG Group in 1995 and has seen it grow into one of the country’s biggest business success stories.
PSG is an investment holding company with investments in a wide variety of sectors, including financial services, banking, private equity, agriculture and education.
In June last year, Mouton donated R50 million towards the building of a new Centre for Teaching and Learning at his alumnus, Stellenbosch University (SU).
Allan Gray
It was reported in 2016 that Allan Gray, who is reportedly worth $1.85 billion, along with his family gave away their entire controlling stake of the Allan Gray investment company and its offshore partner Orbis to charity.
Gray founded his Cape Town-based investment management firm Allan Gray Limited in 1973. He then started the company after earning his MBA from Harvard and spending eight years at Fidelity Investments in the US.
He founded another asset manager, Orbis Investment Management, in 1989 in Bermuda, now his primary residence, noted Forbes.
He also founded the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation with a personal gift of $130 million; the foundation, which provides grants for secondary and tertiary education to emerging business leaders, also receives 7% of the taxed profits of Allan Gray Limited.
In December 2015, Gray announced that he would eventually donate the bulk of his wealth to charity.
According to a letter to his shareholders, Gray transferred control of Allan Gray Limited and Orbis to the Allan & Gill Gray Foundation where dividends would be used for charity.
Patrice Motsepe
In 2013, mining billionaire Patrice Motsepe and his family pledged half the funds generated from assets owned by the family to the Motsepe Foundation.
The funds, the family said, would be used to uplift those less well-off.
“I decided quite some time ago to give at least half the funds generated by our family assets to uplift poor and other disadvantaged and marginalised South Africans but was also duty bound and committed to ensuring that it would be done in a way that protects the interests and retains the confidence of our shareholders and investors‚” Motsepe said in a statement.
Motsepe founded African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) in 1994‚ which he currently chairs.
According to a report by Bloomberg ARM plans to raise more than R3 billion in an initial public offering of its investment-holding unit.
According to the report, ARC will fold its non-financial services assets into the company and list the unit’s stock on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange before the end of September, with insiders indicating that the company may even raise as much as R5 billion.
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