Up Money director Jude Matsimela’s urgent application in the Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg) to have a preservation order on its assets rescinded has been dismissed with costs.

Up Money, with Uniitco as second applicant, had sought to have its assets rescinded or have Matsimela provided with living and legal expenses, reports Fin24.

Judge Seena Yacoob, however, said the evidence initially produced against Up Money demonstrated ‘at the very least reasonable grounds to believe’ that a pyramid scheme was the source of the property at issue, and the evidence produced by the applicants – Up Money and Uniitco – did not dispel these grounds.

The application for rescission was therefore dismissed.

On the matter of legal and living expenses, the judge was also unconvinced.

‘I do not consider that a case has been made out for legal expenses to be provided for,’ said the judgment.

Yacoob also noted the applicants were juristic persons and therefore ‘do not live’. ‘They cannot then seek living expenses,’ Yacoob said.

Even if living expenses were interpreted as operating expenses, the judge said, no evidence was produced of what those expenses might be.

Up Money took its fight to continue running its grocery club to the High Court after an investigation by the National Consumer Commission and the Financial Intelligence Centre found that it was running a pyramid scheme instead of a grocery club as it had marketed itself.

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