{"id":155035,"date":"2017-02-05T07:39:12","date_gmt":"2017-02-05T05:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=155035"},"modified":"2017-02-05T08:43:34","modified_gmt":"2017-02-05T06:43:34","slug":"guptas-hone-in-on-new-r20-million-newspaper-deal-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/media\/155035\/guptas-hone-in-on-new-r20-million-newspaper-deal-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Guptas hone in on new R20 million newspaper deal: report"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Gupta family has plans for a new daily newspaper which will\u00a0provide \u201cprominent coverage\u201d of\u00a0Mpumalanga\u00a0premier David Mabuza\u2019s provincial government and will be funded by taxpayers. This is according to a report in the Sunday Times.<\/p>\n

The report stated that tender documents for the project show the planned newspaper will be distributed to all municipalities in the province and will costs millions to run.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll provincial government departments and municipalities in Mpumalanga would be expected to advertise in it,\u201d stated the report.<\/p>\n

The Gupta family\u2019s involvement in The New Age newspaper, and the money it receives from the government and state-owned enterprises through advertising, means the new project is of concern.<\/p>\n

This includes The New Age newspaper being\u00a0implicated in a money laundering scheme<\/strong><\/a> in which R17 million was paid to the publication using fictitious invoices for advertising.<\/p>\n

R20-million deal<\/h3>\n

The report stated that the\u00a0draft proposal projected the newspaper contract to be worth over R20 million for three years and that it has been \u201ctailor made to suit\u2026 TNA Media\u201d \u2013 owners of The New Age.<\/p>\n

Provincial spokesman Zibonele Mncwango said Mpumalanga was not looking to partner exclusively with TNA Media on the newspaper project, and that \u201cany newspaper\u201d was invited to partner with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are currently sharing a page with Limpopo [in The New Age] and it is not paid for. We would like to have prominence from page one to three of a newspaper,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wish to reiterate that the provincial government did not offer anything to The New Age.\u201d<\/p>\n

The full report is available in the Sunday Times of 5 February 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Read:\u00a0SA politics gets dirty as fake news sites target media over Guptas<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Gupta family has plans for a new daily newspaper which will provide \u201cprominent coverage\u201d of Mpumalanga premier David Mabuza\u2019s provincial government – funded by taxpayers, Sunday Times reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":49482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5554],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-155035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155035"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155043,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155035\/revisions\/155043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}