Investors have fled the Mi-Plan Enhanced Income Fund, after it announced in February that it would ringfence nearly R1 billion in debt assets exposed to Bridge Taxi Finance.
He says the fund has “exposures to Martius and Redink notes which are securitised Special Purpose Vehicles that have ownership of a pool of minibus taxis and a pool of lease payments , with no overlap of underlying assets”. Williams-Short says these debt instruments “have performed perfectly since we first invested in June 2018, paying all coupons in full and on time each quarter”.“In January, the founder, CEO and largest shareholder of Bridge Taxi and its operating company Mokoro passed away suddenly,” says Williams-Short.
Incidentally, Bezuidenhout was CEO of Transaction Capital’s SA Taxi Finance between 2008 and 2010. He founded Mokoro with Gerhardt van Wyngaard in 2013. It is unknown how he died. Read/listen: Nedbank says the economic environment is worse than expected ADVERTISEMENT CONTINUE READING BELOW Williams-Short also highlights that “the performance of the team at Mokoro has deteriorated”. In earlier communication, Vunani says its “efforts include weekly and sometimes daily lender meetings with management that are driving towards enhancing the granularity of reporting and committing resources to the correct areas of the business.
“Meanwhile, the ‘Main’ fund comprising some 92% of the combined fund continues to operate and perform satisfactorily.”Williams-Short says “the impact of impairments on performance on 1st March 2024 will be -3.77%”.Listed Grindrod, too, is impacted as its ‘non-core’ private equity unit owns 35% of Mokoro . It has written down the value of that stake from R241 million to zero.