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The battle for the control and ownership of water rights appears to be heating up. The call for expropriation of land without compensation was a theme of the 2019 elections. Is the reallocation of water rights on racial lines going to be a theme for the 2024 elections? It is important to understand the context. The […]
Since 1998, the Competition Act (the Act) has regulated merger activity. Large mergers need to be assessed and approved by the Competition Commission (the Commission) before they can be implemented. Until February 2019, mergers were assessed only on their impact on competition. This all changed in February 2019 when the Act was amended to state that the […]
The 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as COP28, will be held in Dubai from 28 November until 12 December 2023. At COP21, in 2015, the world agreed (the Paris Agreement) to limit global warning to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels, by 2050. To remain on target, science tells us that emissions […]
The last leg to the liberalisation of the Energy Sector so as to allow for private sector participation, is contained in the Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill (the Bill) which has been published by the Portfolio Committee on Mineral Resources and Energy, and on which written comments need to be submitted by 13 October 2023. Submissions need to […]
In a keynote address at Daily Maverick’s First Earth Edition of The Gathering, held in Cape Town on 26 May 2023, former Eskom CEO, Andre de Ruyter, spoke about the opportunities to our economy in embracing climate change. He stated that “… this is a huge opportunity, but it requires us to have a coherent policy environment, we […]
In the Government Gazette of 14 October 2022, the Competition Commission (the Commission) amended its guideline on small merger notifications (the Guideline). The Guideline comes into effect on 1 December 2022. The Competition Act distinguishes between a small merger, an intermediate merger and a large merger. Large and intermediate merger transactions require mandatory notification and […]
The Expropriation Bill was finally passed by the National Assembly on Wednesday, 28 September 2022. The first version of the Bill was withdrawn in 2008 when the Parliamentary legal advisors concluded that it was unconstitutional for its exclusion of recourse to courts. The next version of the Bill was tabled in 2015 and passed in […]
President Ramaphosa announced in his address of 25 July 2022 that in order to end loadshedding it was urgently necessary to add more capacity to the grid. This would be achieved by accelerating greater private investment in generation capacity. In 2021 the licencing threshold was increased to 100MW. Following the success of this reform and […]
On 21 September 2021, the High Court, Pretoria, set aside various provisions of the 2018 Mining Charter (the Charter) following a review application brought by the Minerals Council of South Africa. The Court confirmed that the Charter is a policy document and is not legislation. It applies only when a decision is to be made […]
The final Constitution of 1996 brought about a compromise between the protection of private property and the need to achieve fundamental land reform. Section 25 of the Constitution protects the ownership of private property and provides that property may only be expropriated for a public purpose or in the public interest and the amount of compensation must be […]
