Direct
Direct shareholding.
A Black-owned party holds real shares with real votes. Cleanest scorecard outcome, highest governance overhead. Appropriate where the partner is genuinely active in the business.
The Approach
Structured once.
Managed for the long horizon.
A Tusker mandate has two phases and one governance discipline holding them together. The structuring phase designs the instrument your advisors can defend. The management phase keeps the points on the scorecard, the verification clean and the accounts intact — year after year.
01 / PHASES
How a Tusker mandate is delivered.
Seven steps from introduction through to annual stewardship. No step is optional, but the pace of each is set by you. We have closed in a week and we have closed over six months — both were the right answer for the client in question.
Step 01
Scoping call
45 minutes. Your turnover band, current B-BBEE score, sector code if any, growth plans, shareholder constraints, tax residency, offshore considerations. We tell you in that call whether we're the right fit — and if not, who is.
Step 02
Structural options memo
A short paper covering two to three structural options against your objectives: scorecard movement, tax consequences, financing path, dilution exposure, exit mechanics. Written so your CFO, tax advisor and attorney can read it in parallel and converge quickly on a preferred route.
Step 03
Financial modelling & tax opinion
The chosen structure is fully modelled — cashflow to the B-BBEE party, cost to the mandating entity per scorecard point, IFRS treatment, CGT exposure, annual accounting footprint. We brief your tax advisor directly and ask for their written opinion before anything is signed.
Step 04
Documentation & legal review
Standardised legal templates, tailored to the mandate. We welcome parallel review by your attorneys of record. Clear agreements, no "gotchas", no drafting designed to obscure economic reality from a future verification agent. Fronting risk is engineered out at this stage.
Step 05
Funding & close
Where financing is required, we run a compact debt or preference-share raise, typically with one of the commercial banks or our established funding partners. Close is usually a same-day signing against a verified condition-precedent list.
Step 06
Ongoing discretionary management
This is the part most providers skip. Tusker holds a Category II FSP licence and manages the ownership instrument on a discretionary basis. That means: we make the governance decisions the instrument requires, in line with a written investment mandate, so that your scorecard points keep performing without further effort from your team.
Step 07
Annual verification support
We engage your verification agent directly each year, supply the evidence pack, answer the queries, and attend the site visit if useful. Nine years of clean verifications across every client. No adverse findings to date.
02 / INSTRUMENTS
Structures we've implemented.
The B-BBEE Codes recognise roughly a dozen ownership methods — each appropriate to a specific commercial, tax and governance context. We don't pick a favourite. The right instrument is the one that answers your board's objectives without creating new problems elsewhere.
Broad-Based · ESOP · Trust
Broad-based ownership vehicles.
Employee or community ownership structured through a trust or ESOP. Meaningful empowerment, clear distribution mechanics, good story. Trust drafting and governance matter enormously.
Private Equity
Private-equity wrapper.
A B-BBEE-rated private-equity vehicle takes the ownership position. Provides professional governance and funding, scales naturally as the business grows.
Pref shares
Preference-share financing.
The economic workhorse of most B-BBEE deals. Balances the B-BBEE party's required return with the mandating entity's cashflow reality. Tax-efficient if structured correctly.
Hybrid
Hybrid structures.
Where one instrument doesn't answer all the constraints — tax, governance, exit, verification — a compound structure stacks two or three methods. The most common pattern for multinationals.
Equity Equivalents
Equity Equivalent Investment (for reference).
EEIP is a DTIC-negotiated alternative available to foreign subsidiaries. Powerful but slow. Most multinationals we engage with already looked at EEIP and chose a Tusker mandate because it runs faster and opens to all entity types.
Detail in the Guide
Every method above — plus options & warrants, Section 21,
sale-of-assets and others — is unpacked in the B-BBEE Ownership
Guide, with scorecard treatment, financing shape and typical
pitfalls. Download it →
03 / SCOPE
What Tusker is — and what Tusker isn't.
Plain language about where our mandate starts and ends. A tight scope is the only way an ownership structure survives the nine years we've asked it to.
Tusker is
A Category II discretionary manager.
Licensed by the FSCA under FSP 49558. Both founders are registered Key Individuals. Our mandate is investment-managerial, not advisory — we make the governance and investment calls the instrument requires.
Tusker isn't
A B-BBEE compliance shop.
We don't audit your scorecard, we don't issue verification certificates, we don't sell training. Those are separate disciplines — we'll introduce you to a good practitioner if you need one.
Tusker is
The custodian of the ownership instrument.
Once the structure is in place, we manage the B-BBEE vehicle on an ongoing basis — resolutions, distributions, verification support, annual financial statements, governance housekeeping.
Tusker isn't
An investment fund.
We don't pool client capital. Each mandate is bilateral between Tusker and the client's ownership structure, governed by a standalone investment mandate. No co-mingling, no side-letters.
Tusker is
Priced bespoke, per mandate.
Fees reflect the structuring complexity, the size of the equity under management, and the ongoing governance load. Quoted in writing before any work begins. Similar cost-per-point to other scorecard elements, materially higher strategic value.
Tusker isn't
A vehicle for "fronting".
Ever. Every structure we manage is substantively Black-owned, substantively Black-governed, and survives Commission scrutiny because of it. We will walk away from an engagement that tries to bend this.
Next
Start with a 45-minute scoping call.
No obligation and no mandate pitch. We'll tell you in plain terms whether a Tusker mandate fits your B-BBEE objective — and if it doesn't, who you should be speaking to instead.
Book a scoping call →Partner reply
< 24 hrs
By a Key Individual, not an assistant.
First meeting
45 min
Focused. Agendaed. Useful either way.