Big Brother�s knife in the back

On Wednesday 12 January, 2000, the affected workers and the nation woke to news they had been dreading for months. The country’s pride and joy, its very own vehicle assembly plant, had closed its doors despite previous assurances that operations would keep going.

As the political blamestorm settled in later months, two schools of thought on the cause of the shutdown would emerge. In the first scenario, the Broadhurst plant’s closure was due to group-wide liquidity problems that were also manifest in South Africa and were linked to a clamp-down on the main investor, Billy Rautenbach who was accused of fraud of tax evasion.