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This comes following reports in Business Day, Beeld and Die Burger that the Gauteng branch of Naspers subsidiary Paarl Web printed election documentation for the political party.
"All our newspapers have in the past taken a strong stand against any organisation which financially or otherwise supported the regime of President Robert Mugabe," the petition to Vosloo reads. "We were also very critical about the way our own government handled the Zimbabwe situation.
"The personal experience and journalistic evidence of several of our Naspers colleagues who reported from Zimbabwe during the past few years, very often under dangerous and unstable conditions, showed without a shadow of a doubt that these viewpoints were correct.
"In the light of this we believe that the acceptance of the Zanu-PF contract constitutes, at the very least, a very serious lack of judgment and we would hope that Naspers, as the parent company of Paarl Web, would acknowledge this."
"We therefore believe it appropriate that the R3m that Paarl Web apparently received for this contract be given to organisations which aims to alleviate the plight of the people of Zimbabwe."
Paarl Web Gauteng's general manager, Jandre de Milander, told Beeld that the printing order came from a South African agent, and that Paarl Web did not know it was for Zanu-PF.
No comment
It is not clear how much money the company received or who the agent acting on Zanu-PF's behalf is.
Paarl Web CEO Stephen van der Walt declined to provide Fin24.com with comment, while Naspers' investor relations head Meloy Horn was unavailable.
De Milander told Beeld that the company does a lot of printing for African countries and political parties, including the ANC, he said.
De Milander said that if the company had known that the print run was for Zanu-PF, the company would've thought twice about undertaking the work.
Business Day reported on June 13 that the agent had initially approached Caxton to print "a million copies of a high-quality booklet on why people should vote Zanu-PF".
The paper said R3m had been transferred by the Zimbabwean central bank into Caxton's accounts, but the company refused the job after its chairperson, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, threatened to resign had Caxton accepted it.
Staffers intend to deliver the petition to Naspers' chairperson Ton Vosloo on Wednesday June 25.
- Fin24.com
- Fin24.com is part of Fin24, a Naspers subsidiary.
