Jannie Mouton. The trades generated around R31m for an undisclosed beneficial owner, R21m for the PIC, and R74m for three entities owned by the Jannie Mouton Familietrust. Picture: Supplied The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) is assessing a complaint of possible insider trading in Curro shares in the weeks and months leading up to the Jannie Mouton Foundation’s R7.2 billion offer to acquire all remaining shares in the private school group.
The regulator confirmed to Moneyweb that one of the statutory bodies responsible for monitoring market activity had reported suspicious trades to the FSCA in the months before the announcement, and that the “complaint is under assessment”. A Moneyweb analysis of Curro’s shareholder registers since last year identified a series of unusually timed transactions by five different entities in the period of less than six months before the offer was announced. The FSCA did not identify the parties involved in the trades, the nature of the suspicious transactions, or which entity reported them.
The trades preceded Curro’sSens announcementon 27 August of a R7.2 billion offer in which the Jannie Mouton Foundation proposed to buy out minority shareholders, delist the company, and convert it into a public benefit organisation that would reinvest all future profits into building new schools, expanding facilities, and providing bursaries. Jan Mouton, a trustee of the Foundation and son of Curro founder Jannie Mouton, described the transaction in an interview with RSG Geldsake as unprecedented in scale, saying: “According to our research, this R7.2 billion donation is the largest in South Africa’s history”. Under the Financial Markets Act, institutions such as the JSE, central securities depositories, and clearing houses are required to report suspicious transactions to the FSCA for investigation into market abuse, including insider trading, which is a criminal offence.
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Moneyweb’s analysis of Curro’s shareholder registers reveals suspicious trades by Citiclient Nominees No. 8 and the Public Investment Corporation (PIC). It also identified transactions that could be regarded as unusually timed by entities linked to the Mouton family, which were properly disclosed in the Circular explaining the offer.
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