The JSE will remove Tongaat Hulett from its boards on 3 November 2026, ending a listing that began in 1952. The sugar producer said on Monday that shareholders will receive no buyout offer or cash payment, because all of its operating assets are being sold to settle its debts.
The exchange gave three reasons for the decision. Tongaat can no longer meet the obligations of a listed company, including having non-executive directors and producing audited financial statements. It has no auditable statements. Its shares have also not traded for about four years, leaving the market with no basis on which to value them.
After delisting, the shares will be held as unlisted certificated shares administered by transfer agent Computershare. Tongaat said no value or future distributions are expected to reach shareholders, and that the delisting will not interrupt its business rescue process.
| Tongaat Hulett’s road to delisting | |
|---|---|
| 1952 | Listed on the JSE as J L Hulett & Sons |
| 1982 | Huletts Corporation and the Tongaat Group merge |
| 2019 | Accounting fraud uncovered; about R12bn write-down |
| July 2022 | JSE suspends shares after annual results are missed |
| October 2022 | Company enters voluntary business rescue |
| January 2024 | Creditors adopt Vision rescue plan |
| February 2026 | Sale agreements lapse; liquidation application filed |
| June 2026 | Liquidation bid withdrawn after IDC-Vision deal |
| 3 November 2026 | Delisting takes effect |
The company’s roots lie in the Hulett family sugar business. In the 1960s a consortium led by The Tongaat Sugar Company launched a hostile bid that gave it more than half of Huletts’ voting shares. The two groups operated as linked companies for two decades before merging in 1982 to form Tongaat Hulett.
The decline began in 2019, when it emerged that senior executives had inflated profits over several years, leading to a write-down of about R12bn. Tongaat failed to publish results for the year to March 2022, prompting the JSE suspension that July. Facing a working capital shortfall of about R1.5bn and lenders unwilling to provide further support, it entered business rescue in October 2022.
In January 2024, creditors approved a plan from the Vision consortium, led by businessman Robert Gumede, with 98.5% support. Vision bought the claims of the lender group, which had been owed more than R8bn. The plan’s first option, a debt-to-equity swap that would have left existing shareholders with 2.7% of the company, was rejected by shareholders in August 2024. That triggered the fallback: a sale of the business and its assets to Vision, followed by delisting.
The process nearly collapsed this year. The sale agreements lapsed on 7 February 2026 after Vision declined to extend them, and the business rescue practitioners applied for provisional liquidation. The Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), which has provided R2.5bn in post-commencement funding, brokered a binding agreement with Vision in June. The liquidation application was withdrawn, new sale agreements were set for the South African operations and the interests in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Mozambique, and the IDC is to convert its funding into equity.
The parties say the deal preserves an estimated 250,000 jobs across the sugar value chain. Tongaat, with milling capacity of about two million tonnes, remains central to the rural economy of northern KwaZulu-Natal.