In addition to the old standbys of The Unique Arizona Contracting Tax Structure, MRRA, and That Darn Speculative Builder Tax, Pat and Karen will touch on lots of interesting issues: .
Ed Sells Out
No more Nicey-Nicey from the CCP then, Ed confides to his diary, Xi has proclaimed himself Mr Nasty-Nasty with all the paraphernalia of an authoritarian dictatorship – operatic uniforms, chanting crowds, foreigner-bashing and abolishing personal rights.
What’s to be done? Well loads of my mates are doing very nicely thank you taking the Chinese shilling. They sit on Chinese company boards, get their R&D projects funded by Chinese contributions and pursue Chinese funds for VC money.
These are, or were, respected people some honoured by Her Maj with knighthoods and gongs. They don’t seem to have a problem taking the lucre of a self-proclaimed adversary.
When the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy launched its urgent tender last August to mitigate load shedding, it had one claimed goal: to get cost-effective power to Eskom as quickly as possible.
But when hopeful bidders looked at the rules of the Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (RMI4P), it seemed to many that there was another agenda at play: channel the lion’s share of the multibillion-rand, 20-year contracts to the budding gas industry.
“Is it really the department’s intention to ensure that renewables [and] batteries… are excluded from participating in this tender?” one exasperated bidder would ask officials in the months that followed.