Business rescue is meant to keep a company alive, and Concor is the latest big South African builder to try it. Since 6 October four companies in the group have been run by two rescue practitioners, Nndingeni Moses Singo and Paula Anna-Mart Müller, in place of their directors. Concor used to be Murray & Roberts Construction, and its record runs from the Carlton Centre to the Soweto Motorway and Durban's Pavilion Mall.
The process buys time. Once rescue starts, the law stops creditors from suing while the practitioners draw up a plan to settle what is owed, and the alternative, liquidation, would mean selling half-finished work for very little. What was missing until this week was the detail of how bad things are, and chief executive Marius Koen's sworn statements, reported by Moneyweb on Monday, supply it.
The R4,000 company and the R218 million one
The R4,000 sits at Concor Holdings, the company at the top of the group, which is owned by the Government Employees Pension Fund and the Unemployment Insurance Fund. It is a holding company in the plainest sense: it has no employees, and its assets are mostly its stakes in the companies below it and money they owe it. It owes about R190 million, mostly loans from its own shareholders, and default notices have gone out on them. Its bigger exposure is guarantees on current projects worth more than R1.6 billion, which only turn into bills if they are called.
The building happens one level down, at Concor Construction. Its draft accounts for the year to February show R218 million in cash, and it owes its creditors about R483 million. Koen's statement counts about 1,001 employees in one paragraph and about 1,101 in another. Either way, more than a thousand jobs now depend on the plan.
The work still waiting to be paid for
Koen's case for rescue rests on the order book. About R4.95 billion of revenue is still to be collected on existing projects, he says, before counting any new work. One of those projects is the R1.65 billion Msikaba bridge on Sanral's N2 Wild Coast Toll Road, which Concor is building in a joint venture with Mota-Engil and which is running late.
The owners have been here before. The Public Investment Corporation, which manages both funds' money, told Moneyweb that Concor defaulted on its loans from the pension fund in 2022, and that about R1.18 billion of shareholder debt was turned into preference shares in May 2025. Any further help, it said, depends on "verified funding requirements" and "a credible prospect of a successful business rescue process".
Koen's affidavit is frank about the odds. He acknowledges that "rescue is not guaranteed", and the risks he lists start with suppliers walking away and guarantees being called up.
