South Africa is taking initial steps to promote broader employee ownership, but in a largely unplanned and haphazard way. Under recent changes to the Black Economic Empowerment Program, companies are given points when black ownership amounts to at least 26% of all shares.
In a surprise development, South Africa has reduced the number of points companies with broad-based employee ownership plans earn for Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) credit.
South Africa's current Black Economic Empowerment program provides favored government contracting to companies that meet rules for expanding ownership to blacks.
The Clicks Group, an 8,000-employee South Africa-based retailer of health and wellness products across Africa, has announced that employees will receive a payout of $1.3 billion rand ($110 million dollars) as the first of one of two installment distributions of their employee stock ownership plan
ESOPs are more common in the banking industry than any other, and that may not be such a good thing right now, at least for those banks heavily into subprime mortgages. Sovereign Bank is being sued by a group of employees over the company's ESOP and company stock in the 401(k) plan.
