The City of Cape Town’s determination to allow four extra ‘intrusive’ floors on a city centre building is proving a costly business. After losing a Western Cape High Court case with costs a year ago, the City Council appealed to a full Bench and last week it lost again – also with costs, says a Times Select report.

The appeal judges were just as scathing as the judge in the first case about the decision by the council’s former head of building development management, Peter Henshall-Howard, to give the go-ahead for development of the Oracle in Buitenkant Street.

The body corporate of the neighbouring building, Four Seasons, applied for a judicial review of the decision after obtaining an interdict to halt work in 2012. In the first case, Judge Ashley Binns-Ward ordered the council to reconsider the planning application by the Oracle’s owners, the Simcha Trust, and to ensure that neither Henshall-Howard nor the council employee who drew up the report recommending approval were involved.

The council and Simcha Trust appealed, but Judge Mark Sher, Judge President John Hlophe and Judge Chantal Fortuin said last week that Henshall-Howard had undertaken little more than a ‘rubber-stamping exercise’ when he approved the recommendations of a building control officer.

The Four Seasons body corporate complained in their application that the Oracle extension – which has remained incomplete – had the effect of turning the view from its flats on the ninth and 10th floors into a blank wall 3m from their windows. Binns-Ward, who inspected the site, said the case was not about the loss of a view or the appearance of the Oracle building. It was about something ‘so exceptionally intrusive and objectionable that it would not reasonably have been foreseen’ by anyone buying a Four Seasons flat.

Full Times Select report

City of Cape Town and Another v Da Cruz and Another