Collusion continues despite bite of competition watchdog
amounting to R55 million.
The collusion with other oil companies went on for nine years, despite the presence of the commission.
Since 2006, the commission has prioritised food and agro-processing because of the prevalence of cartels in the sector and the effect of anti-competitive behaviour in this sector on consumers, especially the poor. Two years ago, the commission found Pioneer Foods, the maker of Sasko bread, guilty for its role in a bread cartel and ordered the group to desist from such conduct.
Pioneer was involved in this collusion with other bread makers, including Tiger Brands (Albany), Premier Foods (Blue Ribbon) and Foodcorp (Sunbake).
Together the four bakeries enjoy a share of between 50 percent and 60 percent in the domestic bread market.
Tiger and Foodcorp negotiated leniency from the commission in which they agreed to pay fines and desist from the conduct.
Pioneer thought it could fight the case alone and ended up being fined R195 million, which was 10 percent of Sasko’s national bread turnover in 2006.
The Competition Tribunal said in its decision that hard core cartel activities were considered the most egregious offences under the Competition Act.
The Competition Tribunal said in its decision to fine Pioneer Foods that hard core cartel activities were the most egregious offences under the Competition Act.
Tourism
Marthinus van Schalkwyk has so far proved to be the most effective Minister of Tourism this country has ever had – possibly because he appears to be the first to appreciate the sector’s importance as an earner of foreign exchange as well as a source of a huge variety of jobs.
Former ministers in that portfolio actually limited arrivals of foreign tourists by discouraging attempts by British airlines to increase their flights to this country.
Van Schalkwyk is certainly hard-working. This month he has visited India and China to promote South Africa as a travel destination – he rushed from Mumbai to Beijing using different (foreign) airlines to meet SAA’S first direct flight to the Chinese capital.
And before that he was in Australia, which, with its growing economy and strengthening currency, is described by his department as a “crucial” source of tourism for this country.
His three-day visit to Sydney and Melbourne included a speech at the annual Asia-pacific Incentives and Meetings Expo in which he urged the travel trade to come to its South African equivalent, Meetings Africa, in the Sandton Convention Centre next week.
According to the Department of Tourism a surprising number of more than 84 000 Australians visited this country in the year to October last year, when tourism from Europe declined because of recessionary conditions there and because there is normally a slack period following the hosting of a major event such as the Fifa World Cup.
Many of them were probably fairly new Australians – former South Africans visiting family – which would help to explain a surprising variation between the number of passengers who arrived at our airports in the past year and the shortage of guests in our hotels in the first nine months. But even if they stayed with family or friends they supported our economy by spending while they were here.
The hotels are doing much better now, prompting Cape Town Routes Unlimited, the tourism promotions organisation for the Western Cape, to say that this summer would prove to be our best tourism season ever, while Airports Company South Africa (Acsa) announced this week that its three main airports handled 9.2 million passengers in the first two months of the holiday season.
Solomon Makgale, Acsa’s group communications manager, said most of these had arrived or left from Cape Town, where passenger numbers grew by 12 percent in November and 17 percent in both December and January, or from Durban where there were 10 380 additional visitors and international travel grew by 105 percent, with an average flight occupancy of 95 percent during the international conference on climate change.
According to communications staff at Cape Town International Airport, large numbers of tourists are still arriving.