Black Economic Empowerment has not always had a positive image in the media. This is partly thanks to a few individuals who became mega-rich overnight on the back of BEE, while the majority of black people, who were supposed to benefit, remained poor. One company that has done things differently is Brimstone Investment Corporation, which was founded in 1995 with money collected from former anti-Apartheid activists: teachers who had taken retrenchment packages and other ordinary people from the Cape Flats. Interview by RYLAND FISHER.

Shuttleworth Fellow Arthur Attwell is on a mission to supply South Africa with cheaper, more convenient access to books – and he doesn’t believe that e-books are a solution for the time being. His social enterprise, Paperight, enables regular photocopy shops to print perfectly legal copies of books for customers, at a far lower price than they’d pay in a traditional bookshop. REBECCA DAVIS finds out how.

J Arthur Brown has been one of the most unpopular men in South Africa for a long time now. As the former CEO of Fidentia, he was at the wheel while R1,4 billion went missing from funds administered by the firm, including a fund meant to support widows and orphans of mine workers. It remains one of the biggest corporate scandals in South Africa’s history. Last week, to the shock and disgust of many, the Western Cape High Court ended six years of legal proceedings by handing Brown only a R150,000 fine and a suspended jail sentence. But Brown is receiving loyal support from an unexpected quarter: some of the very people whose money disappeared under his watch, and who most need it back. By REBECCA DAVIS.

The proposed Licensing of Business Bill has been lambasted by critics as draconian and impossible to implement successfully. These concerns are not limited to big business alone. On Thursday, the Free Market Foundation (FMF) presented two traders who warned that it could lead to unprecedented corruption and abuse of power. Luckily for us all, it is so badly written that it will never pass constitutional muster in its current state. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

Seated at Constitutional Hill, that symbolic custodian of SA’s Bill of Rights, the Awethu Project has a bold plan to create a more equal country that offers better opportunity to micro-entrepreneurs who’ve been disadvantaged by virtue of their education, Apartheid or class. The mission is to seed successful jobs and to create employment - lots and lots of employment. By MANDY DE WAAL.

In an interview last week at his modest office in Parow Industria, north of Cape Town, RYLAND FISHER spoke to Christo Wiese about, among other things, growing up in Upington, his success in Africa, his spat with SARS and getting caught at Heathrow taking millions of rands in a briefcase into London.

The Free Market Foundation has added its voice to those wanting the Licensing of Businesses Bill scrapped, calling it “draconian and “unworkable”. GREG NICOLSON spoke to the independent policy organisation’s chairman, Herman Mashaba, about why he is so vehemently opposed to the legislation and why the Free Market Foundation is taking the ministers of labour and justice to court.

As dramatically fluctuating currency valuations drive ever-increasing global interest in the digital ‘dough’ called Bitcoin, the news has surfaced that South Africa is likely to get one of the first 200 BitcoinATMs installed globally. By MANDY DE WAAL.

The New Age, the pro-government newspaper owned by the Gupta family scored some R125 million in advertising in 2012, almost R75 million of it from government, parastatal or government-linked organisations. Not too bad for a brand-new newspaper that in 2012 didn’t even have certified circulation figures. It is likely The New Age will at least repeat this success in 2013, despite eschewing the print media industry’s gold standard for circulation measurement. By MANDY DE WAAL.

Skill testing question: how many humans currently living on Earth remember Broadcast.com? Answer: approximately nine. The company was purchased by Yahoo during the First Great Dot Com Boom for the not inconsiderable amount of $5.7 billion in stock and turned Mark Cuban into Dallas Mavericks' owner and also an insufferable rich brat. Man, wasn’t 1999 a gas? But Yahoo’s new president and CEO, the highly respected ex-Google-ite Marissa Mayer, is still buying companies 14 years later. What’s changed, if anything? By RICHARD POPLAK.

In recent days, NGO activists and their supporters have begun to be on the receiving end of an email from none other than George Soros about his latest project – Solidarity Now – urging them to come to the aid of, well, European civilisation. Not that he is talking about anything big or overwhelming there, but, then again, Soros is nothing usual himself either. J BROOKS SPECTOR took a closer look.

In South Africa, we make it really easy for pharmaceutical giants to endlessly extend their medical patents – and, consequently, their lucrative monopoly on certain life-saving drugs which could be hundreds of times cheaper. India’s landmark judgment against Novartis shows that there is another way. By SIMON ALLISON.

Fourteen years after launching the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, Rashid Lombard and his team have developed the event into one of the biggest jazz festivals in the world, but it has not been easy. In a wide-ranging interview, the CEO of espAfrika, organiser of the jazz festival, spoke about his frustration at not getting proper support from the authorities in the Western Cape and his inability to garner enough corporate support for the event voted the fourth largest jazz festival in the world. By RYLAND FISHER.

Although most of the focus at the Brics summit naturally fell on whatever the leaders of China, Russia, Brazil, India and South Africa had been saying about that Brics bank of the future, there were other opportunities to learn interesting things that were not part of those group photo opps and the leaders’ anodyne joint statements. One of South Africa’s key new-generation business leaders, Sim Tshabalala (recently appointed co-CEO of Standard Bank Group), spoke with the Daily Maverick’s J BROOKS SPECTOR on the fringes of the summit.

Velvet Sky was a flop. 1time crashed out of the industry. Domestic airfare ticket prices have soared. Still, the founders of 1time are back and planning to launch Skywise, their new domestic carrier, later this year. GREG NICOLSON talks to three of the team about their new airline and their plan to cut air-ticket prices by 25%.

In an utterly farcical day’s proceedings, the board of the SABC was dissolved and the process to appoint an interim board begun. The individuals who will sit on this temporary body cannot be envied: what Tuesday’s events made clear was just how chaotic dynamics have become among the state broadcaster’s top leadership, and in particular their relationship with Communications Minister Dina Pule. By REBECCA DAVIS.

At the present moment, the greatest opponents to the Keystone XL pipeline –basically a tube of money that will ferry environment slaughtering tar sands oil from Canada to America – are tree huggers and folks who wear sandals and socks. In reality, it’s Africans who should be lobbying against Keystone. Because when the United States becomes a net energy exporter, the resources “boom” in Africa is over. By RICHARD POPLAK.

Independent News and Media looks set to sell its South African media assets to a consortium led by Iqbal Survé of empowerment group Sekunjalo. MANDY DE WAAL spoke to the BEE player with massive media ambitions.

This week, two major tech stories – or what once would have been major tech stories – dropped into the economic pitch and promptly sunk. What the sale of Dell, and the earnings report of Zynga, say about the future of the future. By RICHARD POPLAK.

In Zambia, unemployment hovers at about 80%, and 60% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Seven thousand kilometres north, you’ll find a wealthy Swiss hamlet called Rüschlikon, where a powerful South African-born commodity trader lives, close to the mega-multinational he runs. This is the story of Ivan Glasenberg, whose time of relative obscurity may have just ended. By MANDY DE WAAL.

African Rainbow Minerals chairman Patrice Motsepe announced on Wednesday that his family would give away half its fortune to charity, as a part of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s The Giving Pledge. He becomes the first African to do so. How many will follow? By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

Wednesday was the day. Few iconic companies in recent memory have pegged their fortunes to a single event – even if that event signals a massive shake-up of their product line. But Research in Motion played Wednesday’s release of its long awaited, much delayed BlackBerry 10 OS as a day of universal reckoning. Consumers, however, will have the last say. By RICHARD POPLAK.

And before you even try to suggest that his soul deserves a perhaps eternal tour of duty in the nether regions of hell’s kitchen, just remember that millions and millions and millions of people find great comfort in the knowledge that the Golden Arches will always deliver precisely the same, err, gastronomic result, time after time, after time. J BROOKS SPECTOR tries to get ahead of the herd in his stampede for a degree honoris causa in Hamburgerology.

Following its axing of Cynthia Carroll as its CEO, the troubled Anglo American Corporation reached out to another major mining house, AngloGold Ashanti, to pick its CEO, Mark Cutifani, as its own new chief executive. J BROOKS SPECTOR examines the board’s decision.

With Eskom in the process of getting its third multi-year price determination passed by the energy regulator, there is widespread concern about the energy supplier's proposed yearly increases of 16% till 2018. Enter the Free Market Foundation, who will itself make a submission to the regulator, arguing that the price plan is too steep, too damaging to the economy and above all unnecessary. Their recipe? Privatisation. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

Stuck between worker demands for a decent living wage and insistence for broader ownership rights (or even nationalisation) and the market’s implacable demands for profits, Anglo American may have to give up its place as an iconic South African institution and be content as one more middling mining company among many. By J BROOKS SPECTOR.

Thursday was day two of the Sustain our Africa summit, Africa’s first big pow-wow about sustainability. The programme saw speakers and delegates grapple with important issues ranging from food sources to investment in sustainable business. From a man farming maggots to another trying to reform advertising, there were some invigorating ideas on the menu. By REBECCA DAVIS

The protest on the weekend at one of its factories in northern China is leading some commentators to observe that Foxconn Technology may not be able to make good on the massive global demand for the iPhone 5. It’s a story that not only highlights social change in China, but the emptiness of America’s moral indignation. By KEVIN BLOOM.

A new book about Sam “The Banana man” Zemurray reminds us of the meaning of untrammelled capitalism. Zemurray began life in Bessarabia and ended it as the de facto regent of South America. South Africans, embroiled in a burgeoning social crisis related to an important commodity, should take note. By RICHARD POPLAK.