The owners of an upmarket Drakensberg golf and housing estate and their attorneys have been slapped with two punitive costs orders after they managed to secure, for a pittance, three neighbouring farms without the knowledge of their owners.

The Sunday Times reports that the shady dealings of Tropical Winter Trading Pty Ltd, which owns the Vulintaba Country Estate outside Newcastle, were exposed twice in court rulings after the owners discovered, by chance, that ownership had been transferred.

In May 2023, KZN High Court (Pietermaritzburg) Judge Zaba Nkosi rescinded a previous order transferring the properties to Tropical Winter.

He ordered the company and its lawyers, Kruger Attorneys, to pay punitive costs for ‘deliberately omitting to disclose material facts’ and litigating in a ‘stealthy and opaque manner’.

Nkosi said this was not mere negligence but a deliberate and conscious attempt to conceal information and mislead the court. 

‘This conduct is close, if not equivalent, to acquiring someone’s property through fraudulent means, which cannot and should not be countenanced,’ he said, referring his judgment to the Legal Practice Council.

Tropical Winter was not happy and brought an appeal application which came before three KZN judges earlier this year.

On Friday, Judge Rob Mossop dismissed the appeal, and again ordered the company and its attorneys to pay punitive costs.

‘This was no comedy of errors,’ Mossop said. ‘It appears to be that their conduct was far more calculated than comedic.’

The Sunday Times notes that Mossop said Tropical Winter had brought an ex parte urgent application in the High Court in June 2019, in which it was granted permission to access one farm, Glen Ashton, to create and maintain fire breaks.

In terms of that interim order, the company had to trace the owners.

However, two versions of that order were put before the appeal court. One had been seemingly doctored to reflect that the company was to get a sworn valuation of the property.

When the matter came back to court in December that year, company director and in-house legal adviser Jacobus Lamprecht deposed to an affidavit in which he said the fire breaks had been put in place. 

He said it was unlikely any of the co-owners whose names appeared on the title deed of the farm were alive because eight of them would be 100 years or older.

Mossop said ‘at this stage, inexplicably and astoundingly’ the application morphed into one in which the company was now seeking ownership not just of the Glen Ashton but also of Twyfelhoek and Moeders Rus, apparently to avoid having to bring similar court applications ahead of the fire season every year.

The Sunday Times notes that he said the application was flawed in its very essence because no attempt had been made to trace the co-owners.

This was borne out by the fact that one had, in June 2019, been issued with a gate pass to enter the Vulintaba Estate to access the farms.

Another ‘unsatisfactory’ aspect was that the company claimed the farms had no commercial value when the Newcastle Municipality had valued them at more than R7m.

‘Such conduct does not occur by chance. It occurs by design and deception,’ he said.

Full Sunday Times report