The business rescue plan for the South African Post Office (Sapo), published late last week, shows a state-owned company that has somehow been allowed to trade to the point that it owes nearly R9 billion to creditors. The revolving door of ministers in the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies has not helped. By the end of September, accumulated losses totalled R19 billion. It has reported losses for the last 16 years! Equity has been completely wiped out.
Assets at the end of March were barely R4.4 billion. ADVERTISEMENT CONTINUE READING BELOW Read: Government ‘forces’ Post Office into business rescue R12.5bn debt headache for SA Post Office business rescue practitioners The largest chunk of the R9 billion is R4.6 billion owed to Postbank, which was officially separated from Sapo in September. The list of creditors is long. There are 1 100 of them, running to 14 pages! Forget the landlords to which it owes a combined R400 million in unpaid ren