Bela Bela's hot springs push out as much as 22 000 litres an hour at 53 degrees, and somebody has been selling access to them for about as long as most South Africans can remember. The resort sitting on top of them is Warmbaths, Warmbaths belongs to Forever Resorts, and on Tuesday Forever Resorts announced that it had been bought. The buyer is a company called Benus Trade and Invest, and there is almost nothing about it online.
Forever Resorts puts its own estate at 16 resorts, hotels, lodges and retreats, running from Gariep and Loskopdam to Phalaborwa Safari Park and Plettenberg. BusinessTech counts the same properties differently, at nine resorts plus three lodges and several others scattered around the country, which is a difference in categorisation rather than a disagreement about what exists. Managing director Eugene van Jaarsveldt said the business has been part of the South African hospitality landscape for several decades and that it will keep trading under the Forever name.
Where eight of those resorts came from
A good part of the portfolio used to be public property. Eight of the resorts Forever owns today belonged to Aventura, a state-owned company, which sold them to Forever Siyonwaba Resorts in 2003 and saw the ownership transferred on to Forever Resorts. Aventura was then liquidated, with the majority of its properties taken over by Forever in that same year. A set of assets the state could not make work has now changed private hands twice in a generation, and the second time nobody said what it cost.
The buyer, and the group standing behind it
Benus is a small company with little online presence, and it shares directors with Community Investment Holdings. CIH is not small. It is 100% black-owned and women-led, it turns over R20 billion a year, and its holdings include Afrocentric, the owner of medical scheme administrator Medscheme, alongside Temp Coal and Jasco Electronics. Professor Anna Mokgokong and Joe Madungandaba founded it in 1995. The Competition Commission, describing the buying side in its own recommendation, called it a conglomerate operating in various markets including healthcare, information, communication and technology, power and energy, mining, logistics and infrastructure.
The regulatory step came first, and nobody mentioned it at the time. On 27 August the Commission recommended that the Competition Tribunal approve the acquisition without conditions, having taken the view that it was unlikely to substantially lessen or prevent competition in any market and raised no significant public interest concerns. It went through in the same batch as Resilient buying Mams Mall and the sale of the Bloed Street Mall. Nineteen days later the parties told the public. Neither they nor the Commission has put a number on what Benus paid.
