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Snippet 09-2025

by | Jun 30, 2025 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Practice

News

  • RAF
    • The RAF’s CEO, you will recall, was first placed on special leave and thereafter on full suspension, on his refusing to appear before SCOPA. He believes that the treatment meted out to him is owing to the legal and judicial elites conspiring in an effort to have him removed from office, in turn following on his efforts to clean up the RAF and stop the legal gravy train.
    • That same entity placed its acting chief investment officer on precautionary suspension, following allegations that he misinformed SCOPA.
    • But wait, there’s more! The Fund and its head of communications, were found by the Pretoria High Court, to have defamed the Sunshine Hospital in Benoni. Apparently, the utteror had stated that the hospital was involved in a corrupt scheme to move patients from other hospitals across the country to its facility and there overcharged/over serviced the patients. https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAGPPHC/2025/561.pdf
  • Labour

  • NPA. The NPA has been much in the news and several calls have been made for its head, Ms Botohi to be fired.
    • The Ace Magashule extradition disaster has led the NPA to appeal a precedent-setting extradition ruling given last year. Predictably, this led to howls of anguish by the lawyers dealing with that case.
    • The Gupta extradition stuff-up is back in the news – linked with the Nulane case.

The fact is that the NPA has hardly covering itself in glory of late. Likewise its investigative partner, the Hawks, suffers from decay, political interference and resource constraints.

  • Our Justice Minister is set to introduce new divorce laws, giving effect to changes ordered by our Concourt in 2023, shortly; the intent is to make it easier for spouses, married out of community of property without accrual, to get their ‘fair share’ when the marriage ends.
  • Our Reserve Bank’s Prudential Authority exceeded its powers in raising objections to the appointment of an Absa chair in 2021: https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAGPPHC/2025/608.html
  • Our government has ditched its rule that government departments should use SITA’s services. One can only applaud the decision, but deplore the result that the potential now exists that state departments may not necessarily use the same software. Predictably, this is the result of a state monopoly not being run properly.
  • A treating doctor may be called to give factual evidence but not as an expert: https://www.macrobert.co.za/insights/posts/should-a-treating-doctor-act-as-an-expert-witness-for-their-patient-in-legal-proceedings
  • A new credit scoring system, introduced by TransUnionAfrica, uses mobile phone call data records to gain access to financial services – a boon to those who are credit-invisible. The difficulty with this is that it gives commercial entities access to private data.
  • SAPO come-back? That entity reportedly wants to claw back courier and parcel services under 1 kg, to which delivery services, it has sole rights. The fact is that, aside from Docex, which it owns, services by that entity has virtually ground to a halt.I love this! BusinessDay has reportedly sued Transnet, the KZN government and eThekwini for R 6.5bn owing to the failures to prevent flood damage in 2022.
  • The LPC website, listing practitioners, mis-functioned for a while – it insisted that I was not a practitioner!

Hard news

CliffeDecker have been quite busy!

Conveyancing/Property

  • I am engaged in mentoring prospective conveyancers. As part of my duties, I sought examination papers for conveyancing: these may be found at: https://www.lssalead.org.za/candidate-legal-practitioners/professional-examinations/conveyancing-practice-admission-examination-previous-papers/#toggle-id-1
  • Standard Bank recently attempted to foreclose on Vavi’s home, and attempted to claim twice the value of the current arrears in legal costs: https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAGPJHC/2025/602.html
  • In the same vein is a Moneyweb report on a property attachment case, which is not yet available on SAFLLI, in which the Johannesburg High Court declared that Absa’s bookkeeping was in disarray and littered with discrepancies! This caused me to go looking and I found another in the same High Court, in which one of our leading banks sued; multiple condonations sought by the plaintiff leads one to sympathise with judges who have to-hear such applications.
  • Can one cancel a fideicommission? Yes, see regulation 61.2, section 68.1 and consider a unilateral notarial deed; you will have to pay transfer duty.
  • West made public an SCA decision, which dealt with the difference between an accrual ANC in which the parties declared values as opposed to one followed by a value statement. Parties are bound by the former but not by the latter. I can but wonder whether this was the intent of the legislature, or an omission. The case is not available on SAFLLI – ask me for a copy.
  • I had, in my last edition, described the eDRS system as a dog show. I have a particularly e-able colleague, who does not want to be a Luddite (after all much is to be gained by a properly functional registration system) but who questions the ability of those who is setting up the system to identify the issues and to provide connectivity to this by all.
  • May a municipality retain payments, made under protest for historical rates and services beyond the two-year period, in terms of section 118 of the Municipal Systems act? I was, this week, faced with the question whether I should pay such a sum under protest and what the effect thereof would be: https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZASCA/2025/86.pdf
  • Where a contract provides several remedies in favour of the creditor, is the creditor entitled to elect to enforce the most onerous of these or must it, given the concept of Ubuntu, elect to use the least onerous? https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAGPJHC/2025/607.html
  • A development loan agreement, disguised as a sale, and the application of the Credit Act; in such a case, the contract would be void owing to the lender not being a registered credit provider: https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZASCA/2025/82.html
  • Damages: conveyancers often encounter sales where damages are provided for – typically calculable on resale after the cancellation of the prior sale. For this to be applied, to sales must be compatible in order to prove a loss (not an easy task): https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZASCA/2025/84.html

Property

Trends

  • There is not much direct news on property trends other than an FNB/Pam Golding repeat saying that the residential market is showing signs of renewed momentum going to interest rate cuts. The last four months have seen a steady acceleration in residential house prices, with May coming in at a 2.6% increase. The price increase almost equalled our inflation rate – which, historically, is what property prices steady at, given a zero-growth population. The fact is that our middle-class is not set to expand given that its growth was initially fuelled by the state, employing those who would not be employed before. With the state largess waning, and the previously advantaged market not growing, the question is whether one can expect better price growth than the inflation rate?
  • Payprop’s Q1 2025 Retail Index reflected that the Northern Cape was still the cheapest province to rent accommodation but which province also had the fastest a rental growth in the country at 13.5%. The Western Cape remains our most expensive province to rent despite providing smaller than average accommodation. Rental arrears, on average, has declined.

On the positive side, depending on your perspective, rental growth for the first quarter is up 5.6%.

  • A Businesstech report holds that there is a surge of individuals seeking a quieter, safer lifestyle outside the major metros – of course in the Western Cape!
  • Standard Bank’s Youth Barometer held that 20% of all its new home loan enquiries come from clients under the age of 35. This, it is said, reflects ‘a strong and growing interest in property ownership amongst younger clients despite broader affordability challenges.’
  • A report in the Daily Investor, says that foot traffic in traditional malls has declined significantly, with shoppers shifting to a redefinition of their experiences seeking something more meaningful than just a shopping destination. The answer appears to be a blend of dining, entertainment, fitness and so on.
  • The Sharemax disaster lingers on in that one of Nova Property Group’s service providers, has filed liquidation applications against the holding companies of six of its shopping centres.
  • The following graph (ex Codera) compares residential house price developments across metros, stripped of inflation after 2010:

News

  • You will recall that much has been said by those who govern us about halting the impact of construction mafias (incidentally, the latest in the news is on water mafias and we all know of the taxi industry mafias). A MyBroadband publication, reported that the rehabilitation of the Golden Highway has been put on hold owing to local taxi organisations demanding money! So much for undertakings to hold this scourge.
  • NSFAS has been in the news often, mostly because of late payments and so on. Its effect on the market was to push up the demand for student housing, owing to many who could not afford such an education, being given the opportunity to do so. This effect is souring, in that investors in such schemes are becoming disenchanted with returns, with the latest being an opinion, that NSFAS should cancel four contracts, worth R1.3bn with four IT companies who were going to manage (and disburse payments) an online portal for student accommodation. The difficulty seems to be the provision of “shocking, unsafe and troubling living conditions” provided by these companies. Whilst on this topic: Stadio is set to open a new University campus in Durbanville next year. Undoubtedly the availability and cost of micro-accommodation in the area will soar.
  • Accommodation for tourists places pressure on local accommodation cost, as may be seen from the recent unpleasantness in the Iberian Peninsula. So, which amenities pay off in a B&B? The following graph is instructive as to what boosts AirBnB rentals (ex, again, Codera):
  • The GrandWest Casino, situated between Parow and Pinelands in Cape Town, will be expanded to include a mall that will boost its ‘mixed-use leisure and retail offering’.
  • The turmoil caused by well-above-electricity escalation will not subside – the judgement in the Nersa/Afriforum dispute on the determination of tariffs is still pending. Sapoa held the view that the determination of electricity tariffs in municipal areas was procedurally unfair with meaningful public participation impossible owing to non-access to cost-of-supply information.

Comment

Our economy appears to be on the mend on the back of the GNU, a weakening dollar and so on. Yet, the statistic, provided by Stats SA, that some 33% of South Africans are unemployed, and the comment by the Capitec CEO, that this figure, given our massive informal sector, should be closer to 10%, drew outraged comment including scorned from Stats SA. The problem with unemployment figures is that there are vested interests on both sides of the debate, and that the Stats SA figure is undeniably not accurate. The motivators are politics (BEE) and generally how to overcome the ‘challenge’ of being unequal. The gentleman was accused of mad, dangerous, voodoo statistical fiction and so on, but the fact is that his comments touched a nerve which should not be ignored and should be discussed. If this statistic were to be revised, our Geni coefficient would change, and our country would be seen much more positively than is currently the case. Whilst most of us are not equal to the task of judging statistics, you might find the following Codera graphs interesting: https://codera.co.za/sas-narrower-unemployment-rate-is-23/

Lighten up

What do an economist, plumber, and garbage disposal worker have in common? They all handle the gross domestic product!