A Durban businessman who died in a hail of bullets while driving a courtesy car from Land Rover has posthumously emerged victorious in a claim against his estate that he is liable for the full value, about R560 000, of the bullet-riddled car, says a News24 report. In a recent judgment, KZN High Court Judge Dhaya Pillay cautioned that contracts – in particular those, as in this case, which were signed on the bonnet of a car – must be clear and uncomplicated and must accord with the law and the provisions of the Consumer Protection Act and not hidden in tiny print.

This was especially in light of the fact that the man who delivered the Land Rover Discovery to Ivin Rattan in November 2012 – to use while his own car was being repaired – could not, in evidence, explain the terms of the contract. A lawyer involved in the matter told News24 ‘we, as lawyers, didn’t understand it...and they (the company) could not explain it’.

In her judgment, Pillay cited a Constitutional Court ruling, which said, even lawyers did not want to ‘hack through gratuitously unclear writing, so it seems self-evidently unethical to impose that kind of writing on others’. She said the Consumer Protection Act dictated that contracts should be written in ‘plain and understandable language’.

Full News24 report