Recent Industry Articles

When you agree on a sale, ensure that your agreement is both clear and comprehensive - or risk the pitfalls of litigation. A case recently before the High Court (on appeal from a District Magistrates Court) involved the sale of a furnished apartment, which the buyer intended to let out as holiday accommodation.  A clause in the sale agreement provided that all furniture and crockery in the apartment was included in the sale at a cost of R80,000, but no inventory of the movables was attached to the agreement. (more…)

It’s unfortunately an all too familiar story in these hard times - your debtor fails and is liquidated, and you are left with nothing but a worthless concurrent claim. But before you write your claim off, there is one specific circumstance in which you might still recover your losses – quite possibly in full. (more…)

“…..’tis slander, whose edge is sharper than the sword…..”     (Shakespeare) A recent High Court decision confirms the dangers of posting (or even just allowing yourself to be associated with) any form of defamatory content on the Internet. An explosive mixture An explosive mixture underlay the case:  an acrimonious divorce, on-going litigation still smouldering, and – the spark that lit the fuse - Facebook posts attacking the ex-wife. (more…)

Property owners and developers who breach environmental legislation face substantial penalties, and our courts are getting tougher in applying them. That’s of course great news for environmentalists, but property owners generally (and developers in particular) need to be aware of the increasing danger of falling foul, even inadvertently, of the raft of environmental laws out there. (more…)

Victims of Crime have strong rights – see “The Victims’ Charter” on the National Prosecuting Authority website http://www.npa.gov.za/files/Victims%20charter.pdf. That’s all very well in theory, but to make our rights real it is up to us all to claim them, and to enforce them. (more…)

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”  (Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook) Your increased risk of personal liability is compounded by the reality that you will at times make bad decisions, or acquiesce in bad decisions made by the board of directors – that’s pretty much inevitable in any business environment. (more…)

Your risk of personal liability for any “loss, damages or costs”, sustained through your actions (or omissions) by any company of which you are a director, has risen sharply since the new Companies Act came into force in 2011.   (more…)

There are many advantages to living in a security estate, provided that the HOAs (Home Owners Associations) which normally run them are financially sound.  Since HOAs rely on the collection of levies from members to fund communal expenses, they should always be protected in this regard by title deed conditions obliging all owners – (more…)

R16,6m – that’s how much (plus interest and costs) the High Court recently ordered two sureties to cough up in their personal capacities. The sureties had, as trustees of a property development trust, signed surety for the trust’s loan from a money-lender. The problem with suretyships of course is that you tend to sign them at the start of a venture, when it seems like a safe and sensible thing to do. It’s only later, when the principal debtor unexpectedly runs into financial difficulty, that you start panicking – and by then it’s too late. (more…)

Last month we considered the case of a trade union fined R500,000 for contempt of court after it failed to take sufficient steps to dissuade and prevent its members from continuing with “violent and unlawful actions” during a strike. This month we turn to the other side of the coin – the very strong protections which our law affords to employees who lawfully exercise their right to strike. In a nutshell, any dismissal of strikers will be automatically unfair “once it has been established that their participation in the strike was the ‘main’ or ‘dominant’, or ‘proximate’, or ‘most likely’…