Will there be drama again at Naspers’s AGM?

A busy week ends relatively quietly, with liquor group Distell the only company diarised to release results.

Friday’s main corporate event is Naspers’s annual general meeting.

At its previous AGM, Naspers directors were forced to use their unlisted, high-voting A shares to prevent holders of the group’s JSE-listed N shares refusing to endorse its executive remuneration policy.

In Hong Kong, Naspers’s primary investment, Tencent, was down 1.67% to HK$353, indicating the share price of the JSE’s largest company will fall on Friday.

Liquor group Distell is scheduled to release its first results since its combination with its holding company Capevin.

The restructure resulted in Distell’s JSE code changing to DGH from DST.

Distell released a trading statement on Wednesday saying its headline earnings per share (HEPS) would decline by up to 8%, but its basic earnings would rise by up to 30%.

Reasons for the anomaly between headline and basic earnings include accounting for the sale of French cognac maker Bisquit to Campari for €52.5m, the trading statement said.

“Normalised” HEPS — which exclude R78.4m in losses and write-offs in an associate, and R40.7m in retrenchment and restructuring costs — rose by up to 6%, Distell said.

The rand continued to swing wildly on Friday morning, oscillating between R14.15 and R14.40 to the dollar as the traders fretted over US policy towards SA.

Reuters reported the US State Department saying: “The expropriation of land without compensation, our position is that would risk sending SA down the wrong path.”

The statement indicates the US government is standing behind the tweet President Donald Trump wrote on Thursday: “I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.

“South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers. @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews”.

The rand was trading R14.37 to the dollar, R16.60 to the euro and R18.42 to the pound at 6.30am.