Are workers having to pay the lawyer fees?
The various lawyers involved in this appalling saga are laughing all the way to the bank; whilst, workers are left to wonder if they will ever see their pensions. It up to employers to inform their staff about what is taking place and it is up to the union members to demand answers. Talk about a bail out is well and good, however, this will not happen overnight and in the meantime what happens to those workers who intend to retire at the end of the year? What kind of pension payout will they receive?
According to a new report, The Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU) is pushing for the removal of the Trilinear Empowerment Trust (TET) trustees and will meet with the beneficiaries of TET on Tuesday next week to formally adopt a resolution to appoint new trustees.
Mr Kriel (SACTWU General Secretary) has advised us that the relevant persons from SACTWU, having carefully considered what to do … recommend that steps be taken to remove the current trustees of TET and replace them with new trustees, as SACTWU is of the view that the current trustees are acting against the interests of members of SACTWU and the relevant beneficiary provident funds, and SACTWU sees no prospect of this changing,” a letter from SACTWU attorneys Eversheds read.
The putsch comes after disagreements by the union and TET trustees on whether to liquidate investment company Canyon Springs. Canyon Springs owes TET over R100m in pensioners’ money.
The other fallout was that SACTWU wanted its president Themba Khumalo and Kriel, the general secretary to be appointed as additional trustees of TET. But TET lawyers were against the move, insisting on conditions which were un-acceptable to the union and the beneficiary provident funds, Kriel said.
SACTWU has also raised concern about the fees that were paid to TET’s trustees. Kriel notes that the trustees were allegedly paid “exorbitant meeting attendance fees of at least R63 000 per meeting, which the trustees appeared to have paid to each of themselves.”
A further report says, Embattled luxury property developers the Pinnacle Point Group hoped for a further injection of the clothing workers' pension money, after R260-million of their retirement funds had already been sunk into the listed company. This is revealed in the court application for the liquidation of Pinnacle by Atvantage, a company that claims it is owed about R1.2-million for project management work on Pinnacle's Lagos Keys golf-estate development in Nigeria.
Pinnacle is vigorously opposing the liquidation application. David Miller, the group's national sales manager, said this week that it supported the business rescue option, as it made "commercial sense to stop the attack on the group".
Kotze van Wyk, Atvantage's attorney, said his client was now considering whether to proceed with its liquidation application, or to allow the business-rescue to proceed. Barnabas Xulu, an attorney at Xulu Liversage, which is representing the trustees of the trust, said his clients also supported the business rescue application.
About R93-million of pension fund money was also invested in Canyon Springs Investment 12, a company co-owned by Enoch Godongwana, the deputy minister of economic development, which has now been placed under provisional liquidation.
With concerns growing about the pension-fund investments, the Mail & Guardian interviewed Sam Buthelezi, the owner of Trilinear Capital, at its Cape Town offices two weeks ago. Buthelezi said an empowerment fund trust was a typical investment vehicle, which also had attractive tax benefits.
"It is not something completely unique to Trilinear. It is a widely used instrument. Our clients, the provident fund trustees, were involved in a dying industry because of the flooding of imports in the clothing and textile space. In a situation like that, the members have only one way of ensuring their survival and that is to have a generous retirement kitty," Buthelezi said. "Our brief was to find them a strategy of high-risk, high-return, to make sure that the members have a bigger kitty upon retirement."
"It is not something completely unique to Trilinear. It is a widely used instrument. Our clients, the provident fund trustees, were involved in a dying industry because of the flooding of imports in the clothing and textile space. In a situation like that, the members have only one way of ensuring their survival and that is to have a generous retirement kitty," Buthelezi said. "Our brief was to find them a strategy of high-risk, high-return, to make sure that the members have a bigger kitty upon retirement."
Reference:
Moneyweb, "SACTWU in putsch to oust trustees; seeks to recover Pinnacle Pt monies," 1 July 2011Mail & Guardian, "Pinnacle was after more worker funds," 1 July 2011
1 comments:
the goose is dead & they now want to pluck it's feathers too. Kriel et al have a lot of answers to provide for their lack of action in order to halt the loss of countless millions of their members monies - recovering that money is a lost cause when they continue on the path of cerebral incoherence.
What a powerful statement from Sam Buthelezi - "Our clients were involved in a dying industry" does that mean Kriel et al have put the industry on a path of no return from the abyss.
Well done to all of you - never have so few stuffed it up for so many.
Ignorance & incompetence have become the order of the day.
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