Dear Newspaper Readers,
 |
Andrew Bonamour CEO of Tiso
Blackstar Group |
Being
in the business of cornering shysters and highlighting inefficiencies would
surely have taught the Sunday Times that coming clean was always the best way
to defuse any situation.
But
when it had its own back to the wall about employing a crooked journalist it
showed it has learnt nothing from its exposés or what it advocates for others.
Apologising
was not in its vocabulary.
This was disturbingly illustrated after my post: Exposed: The Sunday Times’ love affair with a crook (love affair) was published on my
blog on 10/9/2017.
I pointed out how wrong it was that Jim Jones, the one time
Editor of the Johannesburg based Business Day, had continued to be featured as
a writer in the Sunday Times’ business section (Business Times) for eight years
after he had been publicly exposed as a thief in a 2009 report in Noseweek, South
Africa’s only investigate magazine.
As if that was not bad enough Noseweek also revealed that
he had abused his position as one of the paper’s freelances to get his own back
by writing a scathing article about Moneyweb, an online financial publication.
This was founded by Alec Hogg where Jones had been employed as its Mineweb
Editor. Hogg was still there when the firm fired Jones after he stole the
equivalent of R200 000 from it.
 |
| Bongani Siqoko |
On 21/9/2017 I asked the Sunday Times Editor Bongani Siqoko
in an email if he was “big enough to tell me that Jim Jones will not write for
the Sunday Times again.” But he wasn’t. I got a read report and nothing more.
So I put the same question to Andrew Bonamour the Chief
Executive of Tiso Blackstar (formerly Times Media) the Group that owns the
Sunday Times. I told him I got no answer to my email from his Editor Bongani
and gave him the link to my post.
I added; “I accept that this happened before you took over
as CEO (This was in 2012), but that should not stop you from healing the wound
to some extent now, by giving me the undertaking that I have asked for.
“How
different in principle is this kind of behaviour by the Sunday Times to what
KPMG and the like have been doing, even if it is on a smaller scale?”
The replies I got were made even more peculiar by the fact
that Andrew has been, or still is a director of a host of companies and his
areas of expertise include investment banking and corporate finance. They were
so odd that I wondered if perhaps they were the work of a hacker.
Apart from this aspect his assertions had the same tone as
the ones Jones displayed when he took Moneyweb apart. Bonamour’s ones however, did
not even have a semblance of truth in them.
“Are
you sure you have the eighth(sic) person,” his email said. “*Jim Johns bea(sic)
was former editor of BD. There is a *Jim Jones who is also a union leader.”
Business Day is in the same Group as the Sunday Times so I
would have expected Bonamour to have got his facts right about Jones’ tenure
there. He also should have been aware of what happened to Jones when he was at
Moneyweb, and if he didn’t know he could have easily found out.
In
a subsequent email he told me: “You(sic) wrong. Don’t just take Alec Hogg’s
word for something.”
“I’ve got the right person alright,” I replied. I included
two attachments from Google that showed that Jones had been the Editor of
Business Day and Noseweek had carried an article entitled: High on the Hog. How Jim Jones ripped off his website employer and then
spun the story…… Former Business Day Editor Jim Jones.
“If I had got it wrong,” I told him “I would have
expected the Sunday Times Editor and the Business Times Editor to have
corrected me by now.”
Nothing I could do would get him to agree that his biggest
selling paper had made a huge mistake in continuing to employ a known crook and
that it would not be using him again.
Having dismissed Hogg as a liar quite unjustifiably, he said
something similar about Noseweek in his final email: “Noseweek is hardly a
source. They write what they want.”
So with the Sunday Times in the dock his pathetic defence
was to just rubbish the prosecution regardless of the overwhelming evidence
against his paper.
 |
| Alec Hogg |
Hogg, who is now the Editor and Publisher of BizNews, had
this to say when I passed on Bonamour’s comments about him: “I never expected
that from him. Sad.”
He explained that the Moneyweb board had given Jones the
chance to repay the money which he did. “I was against it and wanted to press
charges but was overruled,” he stated. “They did agree that we would inform the
SA Reserve Bank and tax authorities, which we did. I never heard anything more.
“After he consulted his lawyers Jones’ defence was that I
said he could inform our Canadian partners, Infomine, to divert money due to us
into Jones’ Mauritius bank account.
“Your concerns are valid but mud wrestling is an over-rated
sport. There is nothing more powerful than the truth and it always wins in the
end.
“I moved on long ago.”
Today
1 October the Sunday Times explained exactly why its editor would not answer my
question and why Bonamour was defending the use of Jim Jones even though he
doesn’t seem to know who he is.
 |
| Jim Jones |
Jones’ byline was on another Anglo American story on Page 6
of the Business Times. Could we suddenly find him being moved up to the paper’s
Mining Editor, after all he did have the title of Mineweb Editor at Moneyweb.
In the Letters to
the Editor in the same edition Dave Harris fortifies my point perfectly.
Headed Sunday Times is no holy cow he
wrote that the paper had rightly shown no sympathy for KPMG, but we must not
forget that by its own admission it had made mistakes in its reporting of the
SARS investigative unit.
“Barney Mthombothi (columnist) writes that the media has
done a sterling job of exposing malpractice, while your editorial demands all
must come clean and take it on the chin,” he continued.
“The Sunday Times always needs to take into account its own
fallibility, otherwise it may be the case of people in glass houses throwing
stones.”
Well it is certainly not making any admissions in the Jones
case. It is doing exactly the opposite to coming clean, or taking it on the
chin.
How long can we expect this love affair to continue? And
what will it do to the paper’s reputation, especial among the business
fraternity that is well equipped to see the implications of this sort of thing.
Before
I posted this I sent a copy to Bonamour and invited him to make any comments he
wished.
He
retorted that it was “bizarre that
you would drag me into this when I don’t choose columnists nor do I interfere
in ST or any publication. Media accounts for 20% of our business. I had never
heard of Jim Jones until you emailed me.”
It
certainly was bizarre that he didn’t mention this in the first place.
 |
| Anonymous contributor |
He
told me to take this up with the Editor of the Sunday Times and the Editor of
the Business Times which I had already done.
He ended by saying: “You are
welcome to run whatever story you like.”
So
here goes.
Regards,
Jon,
the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman, who tells you what the main stream media won’t
normally reveal about its fellow club members.
*Note: Jimmy Johns is a substantial American
sandwich restaurant chain and James Jones, known as Jack Jones was a well known British
trade union leader who died in 2009. Were these the people Bonamour was
thinking of when he got Jim Jones’ background so terribly wrong and asked me:
“Are you sure you have the eighth(sic) person.”
In compiling this I tried to get both the Editor Bongani
Siqoko and Ron Derby who heads Business Times, to undertake never to use Jones
again. All I got were read reports and nothing more.
