ACTIVIST’S NEW TARGET

Having tilted successfully at Sovereign Foods and HCI, Cape-based engineer Albie Cilliers has a fresh focus for his burgeoning legal skills

Albie Cilliers, the activist terror of Sovereign Foods, Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI) and now African Phoenix, says he’s always been an outsider. “Even as a child, I was never particularly comfortable in groups, and I always believed you have to push back against bullies, or they’ll keep stomping on you,” he says.

That is something he has done with profound success over the past three years. It started with Sovereign Foods, the poultry company from Uitenhage that he felt was unfairly oppressing minority shareholders by not giving them a say on an empowerment scheme. “I’d always just been a passive investor, but when I saw what Sovereign was trying, I realised that executives will often screw you unless you stand up to them. They woke me up, so I studied every aspect of company law I could,” he says.

Cilliers used section 163 of the Companies Act to make his argument and in a startling coup for shareholders’ rights, the court agreed with him. The next year, he battled La Concorde, controlled by Johnny Copelyn’s HCI, using section 164 of the Companies Act for not paying him “fair value” for his shares in KWV. In June, Cilliers won that battle, too.

Theo Botha, the original shareholder activist who has been rattling cages since 2002, says it’s great that “small shareholders are taking companies to task through the judicial system, and actually winning”.

Now Cilliers has set his sights on African Phoenix, the company that grew out of the ashes of African Bank. Cilliers is one of those who has preference

Many people don’t realise how powerful the laws are that we have to protect minority shareholders