Legal Articles and Guides

You find the house of your dreams, agree on the price and get ready to put pen to paper. The house is in the name of a company, and you are offered a choice – either buy the house out of the company or take over the company (which owns the house and nothing else) by buying the shares and thus avoid the delay and cost of a normal property transfer and registration in the Deeds Office.

The nine residents of Ingonyama Trust Board (ITB) land who successfully challenged its residential lease programme are likely to be the first to have the unlawful leases, which were imposed by the entity, restored to permission-to-occupy certificates.

On 11 June the KZN High Court (Pietermaritzburg) ruled that the PTO (permissions to occupy) Conversion Project, implemented by the Ingonyama Trust, was unlawful.

The Ingonyama Trust Board, whose residential lease programme was last week deemed unlawful by the KZN High Court (Durban) and ordered to pay back millions of rands that it illegally received from people living on trust land, is set to face yet another legal challenge, this time in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, says a City Press report.

The Constitutional Court has come to the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) rescue, says a report in The Herald. It ruled in the institution’s favour in a case involving land UJ leased to a school of theology 25 years ago.

Agriculture, Land Reform & Rural Development Minister Thoko Didiza says she has ‘taken it to heart’ that she and others who have held the ministerial position ‘should have done more’ to exercise oversight of the Ingonyama Trust and its board.

The KZN High Court (Pietermaritzburg) has declared the Ingonyama Trust Board’s (ITB’s) residential lease programme unlawful and has ordered it to pay back millions it has collected from residents since 2012.

Prasa will head to court next month for an eviction order hearing in an attempt to move people occupying train tracks on the central line.

An environmentalist employed by the eThekwini municipality has secured a small but important victory in his legal battle to rehabilitate an old Indian cemetery used by a freight company to store containers, reports TimesLIVE. 

Selling or buying a house is a time of excitement and the culmination of a lot of time and effort on your part, so as soon as the ink dries on your signed sale agreement you will want the transfer process to get underway, and you will want it to keep going without a hitch. The best way to achieve that of course is to be aware of what can go wrong and to proactively take steps to avoid any problems.

More than 30 black farmers in Tafelkop, Limpopo, were handed title deeds by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Saturday after 25 years of struggling to own the farms.

The Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg) has ordered the City of Johannesburg to take steps to prevent Dragon City Wholesale Mall and Anchor Projects from utilising Erf 56 in Crown North township for any commercial or industrial activity, or as a parking lot.

The Constitutional Court has dismissed the appeal by Kingsley Jack Whiteaway Seale, Ontspan Bellegings (Pty) Ltd, HI Frank Components (Pty) Ltd, and Schoemansville Ouwerklub over the ownership and control of some parts of Hartbeespoort Dam and its surrounding areas.

A farmer’s application to evict the adult children of farmworkers employed on his farm Hammansdans outside Wellington in the Western Cape has been dismissed by Judge Zeenat Carelse in the Land Claims Court.

Trespassing charges against five Mvezo villagers were withdrawn by the Bityi Magistrate’s Court after their chief, Mandla Zwelivelile Mandela (Nelson Mandela’s eldest grandson), failed to provide the court with the title deed to the disputed land.