Hello, it's Tuesday the 28th of September and thanks for joining me, Simon Calder, for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the Independent.

Today, the South Eastern Rail franchise is torn up amid fraud allegations, but if you're a passenger, don't panic.

I am prepared to declare that South Africa is a cert to be removed from the Red List in around 10 days' time. And Egypt, the Maldives and Sri Lanka

have been removed abruptly from the Foreign Office no go list. Of course, this podcast is all go and completely

free, as is my weekly travel email. Do sign up at independent.co.uk forward slash newsletters if you

like. At 7 o'clock this morning, the government announced that it is stripping the South Eastern Rail franchise from the current owners, who are a combination of the go-ahead group and the French transport undertaking Keolis. This was as a result of what appears to have been a shortfall, some people say a

fraud involving 25 million pounds rightly due to the government. Now the franchisees have given

the money back but even so the markets weren't particularly impressed and they have seen 20% of

their value wiped off the stock market amounting to around £90 million. And the effect is

absolutely nothing as far as the day-to-day frontline staff and the passengers of

southeastern are concerned you will still be able to use the same tickets the

fairs will be the same if you've got advanced bookings they will continue to be

valid all that's going to happen is that the very senior management is going to change really

quite drastically and the finance director of Go Ahead Group has resigned with immediate effect.

We will find out in due course what it was all about. Meanwhile, the unions are demanding forensic examinations of all franchising deals to make

sure that nothing similar has happened. A busy old day on the travel list front, well, not actually

in terms of removing things from the red list, which is what really every attention is

focused on at the moment, but on a tweet which was put out very, very unusually by the British

High Commission in Pretoria in South Africa. Now, just the backstory on this, since before Christmas, there

have been very, very stringent travel restrictions on people coming in to the UK from South

Africa. At one stage, for example, flights were banned suddenly overnight. For the last,

well, five months just about the South Africans have been on the

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