Legal Articles and Guides

Former Mthatha Judge Duncan Dukada’s widow Hlombekazi Dukada will get half of most of the assets accumulated during their 40-year marriage despite their holding separate estates in terms of their marriage property regime, notes a Saturday Dispatch report. The Eastern Cape High Court (Mthatha) ruled that Dukada and his wife had formed a tacit partnership agreement during 1990 in respect of their family businesses and that they had conducted their growing empire – which included hardware stores, a bookshop, tiling and supermarket franchises – as equal partners until the death of Dukada last year.

Consumer protection lawyer Trudie Broekmann is planning a class action against holiday club companies to demand that they refund their clients, notes a Moneyweb report. Broekmann says that she has been studying contracts of points-based time-share schemes, and believes they are not enforceable.

One day you decide – for whatever reason - that your neighbour’s new guesthouse is definitely not first prize in your sleepy and peaceful suburb, so you investigate. You find out that the local municipal zoning scheme doesn’t allow anyone to operate a guesthouse without a special departure permit, and that your neighbour doesn’t have the required permit.

An application seeking permission for 70 new applicants to join a class action suit against the nation’s largest banks and home loan providers has been filed with the Constitutional Court, according to a Moneyweb report. The application brings the number of people seeking to participate in the civil claim against the likes of Nedbank, Absa, FirstRand, Standard Bank, Changing Tides 12 – a trustee of the SA Home Loans Guarantee Trust – and Investec, to around 300.

The battle for former President Nelson Mandela’s Qunu homestead is far from over, with his ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela set to take the fight over the ownership of his rural home to the SCA on 20 November. A Cape Times report says Madikizela-Mandela has argued that a court erred in ruling that she could have reasonably known from 1997 that the property was registered under Madiba’s name.

It was never going to end in the Western Cape High Court. A Cape Times report says this was the statement from Judge Elizabeth Baartman yesterday of the case involving the future of about 200 rural pupils, as she granted the Grootkraal community leave to have their case heard in the SCA.

One of SA’s top real estate companies that has admitted being the unwitting source of the largest known personal data breach to date in the country claims to have ascertained that the dump of personal information – estimated at 31.6m records – includes the estimated income‚ addresses and cellphone numbers of the likes of President Jacob Zuma‚ Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba and Police Minister Fikile Mbalula. 

Organised agriculture and lawyers are up in arms about the government’s stated intention to expropriate seven farms in Limpopo for the R57m compensation set by the relatively new Valuer-General, says Rapport. The seven land owners are refusing to accept the valuation of the Valuer-General as fair compensation.

Home-owners who default on their bond payments should not despair as they will not lose their property if they pay before it is sold. The Star reports this was the message from Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) acting Judge JG Rautenbach, who said people often threw in the towel when they received an order that they had to repay the outstanding bond, as well as an order declaring that the property may be sold so that the bank could recover its losses.

The SCA has overturned a Land Claims Court judgment that effectively found that market value was not the most important consideration when determining compensation for properties identified for land expropriation, says a Business Day report. In the case between a landowner, who was seeking compensation for land claimed by Msindo Msiza, a labour tenant, the SCA, in a ruling that questioned state land reform guidelines, decided the residential development potential of the land was not a factor and should not determine compensation.

The SCA has upheld a Durban judge’s ruling that the eThekwini municipality has no claim to a plot of land it auctioned off in 1985. The Mercury reports the battle for the 700m² of undeveloped land in Verulam first found its way to the courts in 2014. The city contended that the current owners, Mounthaven Pty Ltd, had not complied with the ‘special conditions’ under which they originally bought the land.

The Constitutional Court has refused to hear a bid to overturn the SCA’s ruling that a nine-storey development – in Currie Road on Durban’s Berea – did not have to be partially demolished. The court said an application for leave to appeal bore no prospects of success, notes a report in The Mercury. The development has been the source of discord between neighbouring residents and the developer, Serengeti Rise Industries, since October 2014.

How does the recent Constitutional Court decision [Jordaan and Others v City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality and Others; City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality v New Ventures Consulting and Services (Pty) Limited and Others; Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality v Livanos and Others (CCT283/16, CCT293/16, CCT294/16, CCT283/16) [2017] ZACC 31] on “historical rates” affect you in practice?

Optic fibre is bringing “superfast broadband” to an exponentially-increasing number of South African homes and businesses.  And competition in the field is fierce.  Which is great for us as consumers, but if you live or work in a “community scheme” there’s a catch. How does your chosen supplier physically run fibre cabling to your individual properties?

‘If you get sent to Wolwerivier, what is the chance that you will be able to get out of Wolwerivier, or are you essentially going on a permanent basis,’ asked Acting Judge Mark Sher in the eviction case of 27 residents of Bromwell Street, Woodstock. A GroundUp report says the families have returned to the Western Cape High Court where a new judge is now hearing the case. The families are facing eviction to Wolwerivier after the Woodstock Hub bought the property on which they live.