Group aims to boost skills after buying 51% of Macquarie’s SA unit

A local consortium headed by Mazi Holdings has acquired a majority stake in the local branch of Australian multinational company Macquarie.

Macquarie is a financial services company with 14 000 employees in 27 countries.

The consortium, consisting of Mazi Holdings, AWCA Investment Holdings and AMB Holdings, as well as some Macquarie senior management and a BEE senior staff trust, has bought 51% of the Australian company’s local subsidiary to form Mazi Macquarie Securities. Mazi owns 27% of that.

Addressing the media during an event at the JSE earlier in the week, Fawzia Suliman, CEO of the new entity, said the new board is 71% female and 57% black.

“For us this new ownership structure allows us to do more in all of the elements of the financial services sector council’s scorecard, with particular emphasis on skills development, procurements and enterprise development,” she said.

Speaking to City Press shortly after the press conference, Mazi Capital chief information officer Malungelo Zilimbola said the transaction did not affect the structure and shareholder of Mazi Capital, which scored the biggest chunk of the 51% stake at 27%, as there is no cross-shareholding. “Nothing changes from a Mazi perspective, Mazi owns a chunk of Macquarie but Macquarie does not own Mazi,” he said.

Zilimbola also said there would not be cross services because Mazi Capital and Mazi Macquarie as Mazi Capital remained purely an asset manager, while Macquarie was a stockbroker.

“Mazi Holdings still owns Mazi Asset Management [Mazi Capital] and it just added a stockbroker element to it with the partnership with Macquarie,” Zilimbola said.

Zilimbola said the deal was truly broad-based with the diversity of skills represented.

“We think with this partnership we can grow the pie for all the participants to benefit from it,” he said, adding that the deal is also set to be a game changer for the equity subsector.

Macquarie Group’s head of commodities and global markets, Andrew Downe, said the deal was important to the group’s focus on new opportunities and the local market presented a lot of that.

“Even though we are a global business in South Africa, our business is now South African,” he said.