AB InBev says starts voluntary severance programme in South Africa

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI.BR), the world's largest brewer, has started a voluntary severance programme in South Africa, but the company said a newspaper report that it had offered redundancy to over 1,000 managers was incorrect.

Citing an internal memo, Business Day newspaper said the brewer had offered more than 1,000 managers in South Africa voluntary severance following its merger with SABMiller.

AB InBev's spokeswoman Robyn Chalmers said the company had started the programme but denied that 1,000 managerial jobs would go.

"It is too early in the process to say how many people may opt for the voluntary offer. It is thus completely incorrect to say that about 1 000 managerial roles will be reduced, as has been reported," she said.

"It is important to note that no employee will be forcibly retrenched as a result of the merger," Chalmers said.

AB InBev bought nearest rival SABMiller for 79 billion pounds ($98.38 billion) last year in one of the largest corporate mergers in history and taking the company into Africa for the first time.

As part of the merger conditions, AB InBev was required to maintain the number of employees in SABMiller's South African operations for five years after the date of the merger and not implement forced retrenchments.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), South Africa's biggest labour federation said: "COSATU has been warning that while investment in South Africa through mergers and acquisitions has increased, these investments have resulted in the loss of jobs over time in the acquired companies."

The AB Inbev merger has resulted in retrenchments by a company that has been solidly growing and that has not undertaken any retrenchment exercise in decades, the union said in a statement.

(Reporting by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo and Tiisetso Motsoeneng. Editing by Jane Merriman)