Retirement
March 09, 2010
Hands off retirement funds, union tells Patel
Staffer
Business Day
THE United Association of SA is opposed to Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel’s plans to invest retirement funds money in development projects. “Patel and his fellow Cabinet ministers would do SA a huge favour by focusing their attention where it is needed the most: on service delivery, the country’s water and sewerage crisis, the repair of thousands of potholes in our roads, the electricity crisis, etc, before casting an eye on the savings of the country’s private citizens,” union spokesman André Venter said yesterday.
Patel planned to invest some of the R1,5-trillion of public and private retirement funds in such projects.
This included 5% of the money that private retirement funds invested, and part of the government pension fund’s R700bn assets.
“As it is, millions of rands of our hard-earned tax monies go to waste as a result of poor accounting, bad decisions, corruption and bad management … why on earth would we want to give them more?”
The trustees of these retirement funds were mandated to invest the money under their management wisely, to the advantage of the members of these funds.
“If the state were a business, we at Uasa certainly would not have invested our hard-earned retirement savings with them.”
Venter said Uasa had but one message for Patel: “Hands off!”
Last week Patel said he was exploring ways of investing private retirement funds in development projects by possibly issuing development bonds.
Economist Dawie Roodt thought the idea “terrible”, while fellow economist Mike Schussler did not think it was necessarily bad, but “you need to be careful that there is a positive return on the money”. Sapa
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