A spokesman for the group said that it is possible there may be different conditions for the multinational companies as there had been "substantial changes to the initial views of the department of trade and industry, particularly in terms of management and equity ownership."

Naamsa's BEE task group had aimed to finalise its initial document by the third quarter of 2005, but the deadline has now shifted to the end of the year.

However, there is a positive move in the retail motor industry to recruit black members and develop a BEE scorecard as part of a strategy to transform the Retail Motor Industry (RMI) organisation.

The RMI has signed an agreement with the National African Association of Automobile Service Providers (NAAASP), comprising 1 400 black informal traders. The RMI was, until a few years ago, known as the Motor Industries Federation (MIF), and currently has 7 500 members through its constituent organisations and only a small proportion (about 10 per cent) are non-white.

The NAAASF traders have been accepted as development members of the RMI and would commit to the RMI's code of conduct regarding ethical trading. The intention was to move them to a more formal trading status through skills transfer, monitoring and training facilitated by the RMI.