Legal Articles and Guides

While nobody wants to contemplate their own passing, we live in dangerous times and it is important to think about how your death will affect your loved ones financially. Planning appropriately can make a big difference to the impact that your family will feel.

The battle between sisters over the sale of their father’s home – left to them in his estate – after one of the five lived in it rent free for nine years has finally been resolved in the Western Cape High Court.

Trustees are of course supposed to work together to protect and further the interests of their trust and its beneficiaries, but the fact is that on occasion serious disputes can and do arise.

A parent does not in the strictest sense of the word need to be the blood and biological parent of a child to inherit if the child dies intestate. This, says a Cape Times report, was the finding of the Pretoria High Court in ordering that the mother and grandmother of a five-year-old boy inherit the millions left in his estate.

We live in particularly dangerous times, and making sure that our affairs are in order is perhaps even more vital for us all than before. Leaving a will in place is of course the only way to properly protect your loved ones after you are gone. Take steps now to ensure that it will be accepted as valid and that there is as little danger as possible of it being challenged in any way.

Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has ordered his department to urgently comply with a November court order which would allow a minor child to qualify for an R8m overseas inheritance.

In his latest offering on his Constitutionally Speaking blog, Pierre de Vos has proposed SA should do away with the transfer of 'intergenerational wealth' via inheritance or heavily tax inheritance as a form of redistribution of wealth.

A deceased businessman’s failure to dissolve his first customary marriage by divorce decree has left his family in a legal battle with his estranged first wife over a R3m estate.

Particularly in these times of pandemic, deadly infections and uncertainty, no one can ever say with any confidence that we will still be alive tomorrow, or next month, or next year.

A business tycoon’s secret family has lost their stake in a R20m building on Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard after the man’s widow sued to get it back.

When an e-mail hacker stole R935 000 of Una van Rensburg’s R3.75m share of an inheritance left to her in an obsolete trust, the 70-year-old dragged her younger siblings and fellow trustees – Richardt van Rensburg, Cecile Oberholzer and Tertia Britz – to court.

The DA is bracing itself for a mighty fight with national government to prevent the state from using pension funds to bail out the embattled Eskom.

The daughters of murdered Stellenbosch farmer Stephan Smit allege in papers filed in the Western Cape High Court that his grieving widow is using a forged will to make her executor of his estate, worth millions, according to a Weekend Argus report.

The Constitutional Court is mulling separate cases of allegedly discriminatory wills in order to pronounce on the boundaries of freedom of testation.

For the second time in a year, Krean Naidoo – separated from his late wife – has failed to lay his hands on a benefit of almost R4m following her death.