MultiChoice chairperson’s R22.1 million salary

MultiChoice Group Limited has shared the remuneration details of what its top executives will earn for the financial year which will come to a close on March 31, 2019, MyBroadband reports.

The salaries are staggeringly high, with the basic salaries – themselves ranging from R1.9 million to R7.6 million – dwarfed by their total packages.

Chairman Imtiaz Patel will reportedly earn a whopping R22.1 million in total, almost triple his R7.6 million basic salary.

The company’s non-executive director, Francis Letele, also isn’t doing too badly with an R8.4 million package, nearly double his R4.5 million basic salary.

CEO Calvo Mawela, with a total package of R7.7 million and basic salary R3.8 million, probably isn’t too stressed about financial matters at the moment.

Meanwhile, CFO Timothy Jacobs will earn R7.9 million, which, while the lowest salary of the bunch, reflects a massive increase by more than 4 times his basic salary of a comparatively modest R1.9 million.

The company, which consists of MultiChoice South Africa, MultiChoice Africa, and Showmax, is obliged to share the information as they will be going public. They will start trading on the JSE on February 27.

READ MORE: SABC concerned about Multichoice merger ruling

While the salaries of top brass at the national broadcaster, SABC, have made news before, this is the first time their biggest broadcasting competition – and business partners, as SABC’s channels are included in the MultiChoice bouquet and a R500 million agreement between the companies was signed – has made news for the massive salaries of the people at the top.

The DA slammed the SABC last year for receiving inflated salaries despite being close to insolvent.

Phumzile Van Damme said: “Top management for the year ending 31 March 2018 earned exactly the same inflated salaries of the Hlaudi Motsoeneng era with the basic salaries of the GCEO being R6.5 million, the CFO R4.1 million and the COO R2.7 million. Group executives’ salaries range from R3.8 million (head of television), to R3.5 million (risk and governance).”

Whether these figures are the basic salaries or total packages of the SABC top brass is unclear.

Both the SABC and MultiChoice are in trouble over the R500 million deal in the form of a five-year agreement giving MultiChoice the right to broadcast SABC’s 24-hour news channel and an entertainment channel, SABC Encore.

The Competitions Commission ruled last year that a channel distribution agreement between the SABC and MultiChoice constituted a notifiable merger and recommended that the two must file the agreement as a merger with respect to the encryption part of the deal, to avoid violating competition laws.

(Compiled by Daniel Friedman)

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