Something's gone horribly wrong at Reliable Music Warehouse, with record giant Gallo baying for its blood as it owes the company about R23-million.
Reliable started out as a small radio repair centre in the 1980's. It grew over the years into one of South Africa's top music retailers, with 48 branches countrywide.
The group had just been nominated by The Times/The Sowetan for a retail award last month, but the wheels are starting to fall off for the group.
Two former employees of Reliable, who asked to remain anonymous, told Business Report the all-too-familiar tale of a greedy senior executive who had misappropriated monies in the company for his own use.
They hadn't even been paid their last salaries when they left the company earlier this year.
One employee said: "Reliable was technically insolvent last November, but the group had managed to ward off Gallo for a number of months before things started falling apart."
An urgent application for the company was brought before the Johannesburg High Court last Friday, after Gallo wanted a court order issued for the court sheriff to strip the company of its assets.
John Cameron, an attorney for property group New Order Investments, also brought the application for the liquidation of the company before the court as Reliable owed New Order Investments money too.
According to the staff who worked with the company for two years it had been built into a R300m business over 20 years, but the senior executive "was more of a trader and just wasn't a business guy".
According to these former employees, one executive would "go to one of his stores and just take money out of the till".
It is felt that the liquidation is fair. "This is it, this is where it ends now," they said.
The chief executive of Vodacom, Pieter Uys, is faced with a big task of ensuring that growth continues in South Africa's biggest cellphone network provider.
Uys took over from former chief executive Alan Knott-Craig last year. Uys has inherited the company at a time when there are a lot of changes, from regulatory to economic, which might knock its earnings.
He signed a three-year contract with an option to extend it. He said recently his task would be to reposition it so that it can be in a better and strong position financially and operationally.
Vodacom and its competitors face pressure to reduce interconnection rates, which analysts expect to hit it hard because of its overreliance on the local market.
It has to look for new revenue growth, which analysts say should include providing loyalty programmes to customers and also incentives to register their SIM cards as required by the interception law.
In terms of new acquisitions Uys said that there was nothing yet on the table, but the cellular company was constantly looking for opportunities.
However, now might not be the best time to make an acquisition, since average revenue per user in most African markets has shrunk significantly over the past year because of the economic slowdown.
The costs of doing business in those markets are also high, infrastructure is generally poor, so an enormous amount of investment has to be made to building the necessary infrastructure, according to Spiwe Chireka, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan.
In some cases, operators have to build their own roads to base stations and also provide alternative and often expensive sources of power such as diesel generators to maintain service, because in most African countries energy sources are also not always reliable, Chireka adds.
Based on these comments, it seems Uys and his team will have to work hard to keep the shareholders happy and maintain Vodacom's status in the market.
Research by the life assurance industry last year found that the bulk of South Africans are grossly underinsured.
Things were so bad that most families would have to halve living expenses if the main income earner died or became incapacitated.
The picture wasn't much rosier in the short-term insurance market: a recent KPMG survey noted a contraction last year, suggesting that the economic slowdown had even started to erode people's confidence in their ability to continue paying premiums.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are the fabulously wealthy, those with the luxury of being overinsured - and who might have found themselves extremely overinsured after the recession started decimating their assets.
Hot off the press yesterday is that South Africa's wealthy are cutting their insurance premiums as the recession bites.
It's a new trend, we are told by Pinion Insurance Brokers, as the rich have become more price-conscious over the past year, and started to revalue their assets and make adjustments if they're overinsured.
Financial advisers have long told us that it's foolish to pay premiums over many years based on the initial purchase price of assets such as vehicles - particularly when the vehicle is declining in value and the insurance company will pay out only the current retail value.
Now raise your hand for a brownie point if you contact your insurance company on a regular basis to adjust the value of your vehicle.
In the case of the wealthy, the trend is perhaps driven more by smart investment decisions than the utter desperation experienced by the majority of people in this country.
But theirs is an example that all those with short-term insurance might consider emulating.
The rich, after all, didn't become rich by paying unnecessarily high premiums to insurance companies.
Edited by Peter DeIonno. With contributions by Florence de Vries, Thabiso Mochiko and Ingi Salgado