Johannesburg - The financial services charter, which encapsulates the transformation commitments of banks and insurers, may be resuscitated in 2010.
A meeting is already planned for this week to work towards an agreement on the levels of direct ownership for black people in the country's major banks and insurance companies.
Modise Motloba, the former president of the Association of Black Securities and Investment Professionals, has been roped in as a trouble-shooter to heal the rift between warring parties, which are fighting over what percentage of equity ownership of the financial services industry should be in black hands.
"There are behind-the-scenes discussions led by the facilitator (Motloba) to zoom in on areas of disagreement. Come the end of February, this matter must be wrapped up," said Thabo Masombuka, the department of trade and industry's director for BEE partnerships.
Motloba was black businesses' chief negotiator in the process that led to the conclusion of the charter.
The charter has been on life support since November's public spat between organised labour and the banking industry over ownership targets.
It had been in limbo for the previous 18 months and has delayed the process of gazetting the industry's black economic empowerment (BEE) charter into a BEE code of good practice. The code is a government-sanctioned blueprint against which future and current empowerment deals must be measured.
At the centre of the rift is a coalition of 50 civil society organisations, led by labour federation Cosatu and its close ally, the SA Communist Party, which are demanding that the charter not be gazetted if it fails to comply with the code's black direct ownership target of 15%.
On the other hand, financial sector trade associations led by the Banking Association of SA (Basa) and the Association for Savings & Investment SA (Asisa) want the charter to be gazetted with a black ownership target of 10% - a level agreed on when the charter was adopted in 2003.
The push towards the 15% ownership level could open the door for other black entrepreneurs or for existing black shareholders to increase their stakes, but funding these transactions has been a serious challenge.
In November a frustrated Cas Coovadia, the MD of Basa, wrote a letter to Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan in which he said the banking sector was pulling out of the Financial Sector Charter Council (FSCC).
The FSCC oversees the implementation of the empowerment charter in the financial sector.
Coovadia's letter elicited a strong response from Jan Mahlangu, Cosatu's retirement funds policy coordinator, in which he accused the banks of being "anti-transformation".
In early December Asisa also threatened to stop funding the FSCC.
At a council meeting held in mid-December, Masombuka asked all the parties which had made public comments to withdraw their statements, and they subsequently agreed to do so.
He said the government was concerned about the delay in the gazetting of the charter. It has failed to meet deadlines before, the latest being the end of August 2009.
"Government sees this uncertainty (the gazetting of the charter) as a serious impediment to transformation.
"However, we will not gazette a charter that flies in the face of transformation. At worst it must meet the targets of the codes or at best exceed them," Masombuka said.
- City Press