POLITICAL hotshots Saki Macazoma and Cyril Ramaphosa stand to make a mint of more than R400m courtesy of the Chinese.

In this case, Macazoma and Ramaphosa will get the unexpected boon courtesy of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) , which is making a R37,5bn dip into Standard Bank, which will give it 20% of SA’s largest bank.

As part of the deal, each Standard Bank shareholder is being asked to sell 11,1% of their shares for R136 apiece, while the rest of ICBC’s shares will come through a share issue.

Whether the deal itself gets the go-ahead appears touch and go (see seperate story), but you can see why Macazoma and Ramaphosa (both board members) would be dead keen for it go ahead.

After all, they bought into Standard Bank as part of the Tutuwa empowerment consortium in 2004. Tutuwa is broken up like this: Macozoma’s Safika owns 24%, Ramaphosa’s Shanduka holds 16%, black staff and managers hold 40% and small black businesses hold the other 20%.

The handy thing is, the Tutuwa group bought their 103,3m shares at R40,50 apiece. With ICBC paying R136 for 11,1%, this means they’re effectively making a profit of R95,50 a share.

Between them, Safika and Shanduka hold 40,2m shares, of which they’ll have to give up 4,46m of this stock to ICBC.

So in the final equation, they’ll make profits of R425m on this sale. But while this sounds like a roaring deal for them, the bank might now be quite so lucky.

Effectively, Tutuwa held 10% of Standard Bank SA, but with this deal, that percentage will drop closer to 8,9%. Not only does this suggest the bank will sacrifice charter points, but they’ll also stumble behind their rivals in the race for government business.

CEO Jacko Maree doesn’t seem too perturbed.

Surprisingly, Maree says Standard Bank won’t “top up” its black ownership. “We believe in the once-empowered, always-empowered principle, but this will be a good test case. In a worst-case scenario, we’ll lose some charter points,” he says.

That could hurt, however. Despite having Ramaphosa and Macazoma on their board, Standard Bank hasn’t exactly sewn-up the sort of government business that has gone the way of Absa and First National Bank, through their social welfare payment systems.

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