MONEYWEB: The SAVI today 20.4%, which shows the volatility is still there. Verimark and Acc-Ross were two of the stocks that went higher, but internationally a big news story that has come out is the proposed purchase or rumoured purchase by Johann Rupert, the executive chairman of Richemont, of Blackburn Rovers. It has been said for quite a while that an American is in the market to buy Blackburn Rovers for £50m. His name is Daniel Williams. Our own Johann Rupert joins us now from London. Are we going to have a South African owner of Bennie McCarthy's team, Johann?

JOHANN RUPERT: Hi, Alec, good evening listeners. Not at all. It's a friend of my Wayne Huizinga, who was on BBC4 yesterday morning, and he was promoting the regular season game between the Miami Dolphins, of which he's the owner, and the New York Giants which will take place at Wembley Stadium later this year. And during the radio interview somebody asked him whether he was interested in buying the Blackburn Rover Football Club. Now, in America football is NFL, and soccer is soccer. They call football "soccer" in the United States, so he was a bit nonplussed. And then he remembered the Black Boks. The all-black Springbok team that we wanted to do three years ago, and he said oh, I remember what you're talking about - then he spoke about our London rugby club and how it invited him, and unfortunately nobody made the connection and the next moment the papers ran with the fact that I was buying Blackburn Rovers, which was a little bit of a difference of the price tag between buying a rugby team in the UK, which is like £500 000, and a football team which is apparently £60m-plus. And the players here earn in a week what a rugby player earns in a year. So the answer is "absolutely not".

MONEYWEB: That's fascinating. Interesting to note that the captain of your proposed Black Boks is back in the Bok team - Bobby Skinstad.

JOHANN RUPERT: Absolutely. And I wish him well, and I'm sorry for Pierre Spies and Juan Smith who are injured, but it's going to be fascinating to see Bob.

MONEYWEB: Back in the green shirt. Johann, talking about rugby, what's this with the "third force" and your involvement or alleged involvement there?

JOHANN RUPERT: You know Alec, on a scale of one to ten if Blackburn Rovers is ludicrous, that's at 10, the third force is about 50 in terms of ludicrous behaviour and rumours. One wonders about people that always stir nonsense as soon as South Africa is involved in the Tri-Nations or in a World Cup campaign. If I'm for keeping the Springbok as an emblem, and if I'm for the non-interference by all kinds of individuals in rugby, and when rugby teams are not picked on merit, or cricket teams, when the represent the country, then I may be against some people, but I think all sports lovers are totally fed up with the interference by - and I'm not saying politicians, because I'm not sure that this is an ANC-backed idea. But Alec, I mean you're old enough, you may remember that I was the first person who had non-racial cricket games in Stellenbosch. And ironically golf was praised by the standing committee for sport for being at the forefront of development and helping the previously disadvantaged. So, if it weren't so ludicrous, it would be insulting. But I would just like to say to those people now, that you've raised it, why don't we just back Regan Hoskins and Jake White and John Smith and Victor Matfield and the team until after the World Cup, and let's have our quarrels about emblems and representivity at that stage. So let's just unite behind this team until after the World Cup, and then we'll have some time to discuss these issues.

MONEYWEB: Maybe it's the All Blacks that keep spreading these rumours, in the first place. Do you think we've got a chance of winning the World Cup, Johann?

JOHANN RUPERT: I don't think it's the All Blacks, because I've got people that we used hate like Sean Fitzpatrick as good friends today through the Laureus, and they just find it totally perplexing, they say, every time you get unity. And the team is so well knit today - I know a couple of the players and they're really a unit. And if they're left alone and if we don't have injuries, I certainly believe we have a very strong chance. But let's just back Regan Hoskins, Jake, Juan Smith, Victor Matfield as the current captain, and have a bit of unity until the end of the World Cup, and let's then argue about whether we want to keep the Springbok and whether we should succumb to non-performance or, as one budding coach said, we'll have to get used to losing or accept losing because of not picking the best players. I think when a country plays you pick you best players. I don't mind quotas at Currie Cup level, etc, but to lose Kevin Pietersen was a joke, and I gather the Australians have changed their rules and they're all coming to the Craven Week. We can't afford to lose our best youngsters any more.

MONEYWEB: For sure. Johann, just getting back to the whole story around Blackburn Rovers, and not particularly that one, but in Omaha this year Warren Buffet made quite a lot of comments about "ego investment" - and I guess that is what one would be seeing increasingly now with soccer teams.

JOHANN RUPERT: It's a total joke. You can never, ever show a return on a football/soccer team in the UK. In the United States you can with the NFL, because they have salary caps that are strictly adhered to, and then obviously they've got the draft system, so the team at the bottom gets the first round draft picks. And then they have revenue sharing, where the visiting team gets 34% of the gate. So, typically American, they work the model out, and there you can actually show a proper return. But we inherited the rugby investments in South Africa - we didn't buy it, we actually did it, the individuals involved, for them to help us with e.tv. And our return on investment in sale, where we're a minority investor, is less than our cost of capital - and that includes my wife's seeing the Blue Bulls. I don't even want to talk about the loss that we've had on my team, the Stormers. So that return on the Blue Bulls company was above our cost of capital, but in a combined investment, sales investment out of the rugby franchise, it's less than the cost of capital. So I don't know where people think you can make money out of sport franchises.

MONEYWEB: So you're definitely not in the market to buy an English soccer team?

JOHANN RUPERT: An English soccer team? No. I'm sorry, I can understand how they could have misconstrued what Jake had said. Our rugby team that we're interested in with Bob was for another reason; it was because Clive Woodward was at that stage was raiding South African players, and we wanted to give them an avenue to play abroad while keeping them available for our national team, which is a totally different matter - plus there are between 500 000 and 800 000 South Africans in greater London, so you would have had a very strong support base. If you get over 15 000 spectators a match in the UK then it breaks even. So that, with the South African fan base could have worked.

MONEYWEB: Johann, Wayne Huizenga - he's the same person who in fact was the World Entrepreneur of the Year a couple of years back?

JOHANN RUPERT: That's right. He's been a friend for very, very many years

MONEYWEB: And a serial entrepreneur - is that the kind of friends you generally tend to have? People who are also entrepreneurs, like yourself.

JOHANN RUPERT: Well, I like Wayne and Martie, and in fact he's a member of Leopard Creek and genuine, genuine entrepreneur. He started driving a dump truck and he ended up selling blockbusters to Sumner Redstone for some US$8bn.

MONEYWEB: And you say he's got an investment here in South Africa?

JOHANN RUPERT: Yes, he's an owner in Leopard Creek. By the way, you were talking about the market, but it's interesting - have you noticed what's happening to the CDOs [collateralised debt obligations] in with Bear Stearns? I mean, maybe one should look a little bit at what a friend of mine calls "junk" in investment grading - investment grade clothing, because when Merrill starts pulling lines and securitising its assets, you know, the whole sub-prime sector is being hit, and this has been our fear for a while. These collateralised debt obligations.

MONEYWEB: Johann, you've been pretty good in calling these markets in the past. I remember once the "Rupert the Bear" was what you were termed, and it was ahead of a slide in stock markets. Are you getting nervous at the level of share prices?

JOHANN RUPERT: I've been for a while, but that's how I got the nickname. I'm just worried about the level of liquidity that's available now. Whether it is, as some people contend, a savings club that's driving it, which is Chinese petroleum-producing companies that are not investing or spending, but that have excess savings and they're putting it into the world markets, or whether it's a credit-led glut, which some people contend - I tend to go for the savings glut, and that the risk premium has disappeared in totality. So, if a normal risk premium is 150 to 200 basis points, the moment this returns, all of the models that I've seen in the private-equity market looks different. But I don't think the problem is going to start with the private-equity markets, even though I don't see how they're going to produce real returns. My concern is with some of the hedge funds. Panic investors start asking for their money back, and they've got to start unwind the gearing or the leverage. And this thing at Bear Stearns is a lot more serious than what appears on the surface. So when you have fire-sale knock-down prices of mortgage-backed assets and you look at what happened to the key derivative indexes, maybe that's what's causing a bit of red ink.

MONEYWEB: Johann Rupert is executive chairman of Richemont, giving us broad brush strokes - but, as he was saying, he is definitely not buying Blackburn Rovers. Isn't that amazing, James, how something can get misconstrued in that way and make world headlines?

JAMES BISHOP: Quite so, it's almost as unbelievable as the old Gold Fields story a couple of months ago, when you saw the Gold Fields price shoot all the way up to R150 on the back of some unknown US investor seeking to buy them out.

MONEYWEB: I think the Gold Fields story was maybe manipulated and engineered. This one - the Black Boks. Man, I suppose for an American to get that mixed up, the  Blackburn Rovers - not too difficult.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER