Koos in the firing line

Revelations that Naspers’s pay-tv arm Multichoice paid millions to the SABC and the Guptas have sparked a heated exchange

Not many people get to accuse Naspers chairman Koos Bekker — SA’S fourth-richest man (estimated wealth: R16.5bn) — of having a flexible relationship with the truth.

But that’s what Yunus Carrim, former communications minister and now chairman of parliament’s portfolio committee on finance did this week.

Leaked e-mails revealed how Multichoice paid R100m to the state-owned SA Broadcasting Corp (SABC) and R25m to ANN7 (which was owned by President Jacob Zuma’s friends, the Guptas).

The implication is that as a quid pro quo, Naspers wanted to sway government policy on settop box encryption to avoid competition.

As calls for an independent inquiry into Multichoice mount, Carrim told the Financial Mail he believed Bekker “had a big hand in changing government policy on encryption” back in 2014.

“Bekker,” says Carrim, “is astonishingly arrogant. He’s done very well in the ICT sector and no doubt he’s very creative and enterprising, but I saw very little of that in my exchanges.

“He was dogmatic, rigid, pushy. He seemed annoyed with me for not seeing how brilliant he is. Brilliant he may be, but that doesn’t give him the right to his culture of entitlement.”

This is the most brutal attack yet on Bekker from Carrim.

But Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk said in an interview he was baffled by the suggestion that Naspers played an underhand role in swaying government policy.

“There really was nothing underhand about it: we were very explicit on our view that encryption is not beneficial. We even published an open letter around this.”

But claims of Naspers’s lobbying seems at odds with Bekker’s statement to the Sunday Times last week, in which he said set-top box encryption “is just a sideshow. [It’s] not interesting today to anyone”.

On this point, Carrim responds: “Bekker means it’s not interesting to him and it’s a sideshow . . . because he wants to distract from Multichoice and Naspers’s highly questionable behaviour in shaping government policy on encryption.”

Carrim says that while technology may have moved on, there is still an obligation to consider how encryption could contribute to encouraging competition in SA’S broadcasting media.

“It’s not about the relevance of set-top box encryption today as much as Naspers and Multichoice bulldozing everybody to serve their narrow commercial interests on this matter — and getting their way,” he says.

Initially, Naspers was heavily criticised for seeking to duck the allegations, as Van Dijk repeatedly told Moneyweb this was a Multichoice “board issue”, and not a Naspers issue. This seemed disingenuous not only because Naspers owns Multichoice, but also because Van Dijk is on the broadcaster’s board.

But Van Dijk says he’d never intended to wash his hands of this scandal and make it Multichoice’s issue.

“Wash my hands — that is a very suggestive way of saying it. What we’ve said consistently is that we as Naspers are a majority shareholder in this business and we need to get to the bottom of it. People are twisting words here.”

He says the allegations “are very serious” and there’s no truth to claims that Naspers “doesn’t care” about the issue.

But if Multichoice is indeed aware of the darkening public sentiment over its payments to the Guptas, it shows little sign of it.

CEO Imtiaz Patel fobbed off questions on this relationship to spokesman Jackie Rakitla, who himself refused to answer specific questions.

On whether Multichoice expe-