The Trustco financial results saga has now reached farcical proportions. It’s amazing the JSE has tolerated such tardiness.
The controversial Namibian investment group has still not managed to publish its year to end-August 2024 audited financial results. The 2025 financial year results are now also long overdue, with the 2026 financial year-end now nearing its close.
Shareholders last saw numbers for the interim period to end-February 2024 — and these were unaudited. So, at this point Trustco shareholders have absolutely no clue as to the financial standing of the company whose prospects, at last count, hinged very much on its much-vaunted diamond mining interests and its real estate holdings near Windhoek.
For both those interests, the underlying dynamics have changed markedly in the past two years … for better and worse.
Officially, Trustco advised last week that it expects the outstanding audits to be completed during the last quarter of this year. Presumably that means shareholders might still get to glance at the 2024 and 2025 audited financials before year-end.
It remains baffling that an audit process on a small cap business can be so prolonged. Much larger and infinitely more complex corporations manage to present audited financials well within the three months from year-end timeframe.
In the interim, though, major Trustco shareholder, Riskowitz Capital Management (RCM), has called another special meeting for mid-August to remove the group’s current directors and appoint new board members.
RCM states that the purpose of the meeting is to “reconfigure the board of Trustco to reorient the company towards a sustainable growth path and improve corporate governance”. At this point, changes initiated at the special meeting might be a very encouraging and long-overdue development.
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