When a company leaves the stock exchange, the question every shareholder asks is what they get for their shares. Tongaat Hulett has answered it in its own announcement. There is no offer, there will be no payment, and shareholders should not expect anything when the rescue ends either.
The JSE will remove the sugar producer from its main board at the start of business on Tuesday, 3 November. That ends a listing that began in 1952, when the company joined the exchange as J L Hulett & Sons, and it grew into the country's largest producer of refined sugar.
Four years without a price
Shareholders do keep their shares. After 3 November they become unlisted shares recorded by the transfer agent Computershare, and every holder gets a statement for them. What goes is the market: the shares come off Strate, the electronic platform JSE trades settle on, so any transfer has to be reported to Computershare directly. In practice that changes less than it sounds, because nobody has been able to trade Tongaat on the JSE since July 2022.
That was when the JSE suspended the listing, after Tongaat failed to publish its results for the year to March 2022. Three months later the company put itself into business rescue, which hands full control to outside practitioners in place of the board, and every non-executive director resigned within a week. The company says no reliable way of valuing the shares exists, or is expected to.
The rescue plan creditors adopted in January 2024 was built on turning the company's debt into shares, with a sale of everything as the fallback. Shareholders were asked to approve their part of it in August 2024, and did not. That sent the practitioners to the fallback, a sale of the businesses to the Vision consortium, and from then on, the company says, it was heading towards being a shell with no value expected for shareholders.
So when the JSE asked Tongaat to show why it should stay listed, nobody argued. The directors and the practitioners signed representations saying they would not oppose the removal or ask for more time, because their own plan had always pictured the company leaving.
Restructure, sell or wind up
What happens to the sugar business itself is still open. The company lists three outcomes left: a restructuring under an agreement announced in June, a sale of the businesses as going concerns, or a winding-up. In every one of them, Tongaat ends up no longer owning the businesses it runs. IOL reports that the Industrial Development Corporation's R2.5 billion loan, the money the rescue has been running on, has been extended to 30 November.
After 3 November, Tongaat loses its place on SENS too. Its website will be the only place it says what comes next.
