Are Municipal officials personally liable for unauthorised or irregular expenditure?
The Supreme Court of Appeal recently had to consider this question and the provisions of Section 32 of the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) and the provisions of Section 172(1) of the Constitution in a judgment delivered on 8 November 2024 in Mbambisa and Others v Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality [2024] ZASCA 151 (8 November 2024). […]
Can a state entity avoid paying a contractor where their appointment is challenged?
Increasingly, municipalities and state-owned entities are seeking to set aside contracts that are concluded following an irregular tender process. The question often then arises as to whether the contractor is still entitled to payment for services rendered in terms of the unlawful contract. The Constitutional Court recently had to consider this question in a judgment […]
Challenging an arbitration award on the grounds of serious irregularity – Lessons from the UK
INTRODUCTION This tale is about two Irish businessmen who came ever so close to striking it very rich in Nigeria. Mr Michael Quinn and Mr Brendan Cahill had operated various businesses through various entities and guises since 1992 in the morally and ethically fluid economic landscape of Nigeria. They had on a number of occasions […]
Integrated Resource Plan 2023
PWC has estimated that the impact of load shedding on GDP is up to 5 percentage points. This implies that our economy should have grown by close to 7% in 2022 and 6% in 2023. South Africa has also committed to a low-carbon climate economy and society and part of this has been the JUST […]
Water Rights and Transformation
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 […]
Mergers and Public Interest Guidelines
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 […]
Duty to Supervise
INTRODUCTION What is the ambit of the Employer’s Agent’s (“EA”) duty to supervise the execution of construction works and what are the consequences of a failure to do so properly? The extent of the duty will be set out in the relevant contract which must be one’s first port of call in addressing […]
Liberalisation of the Energy Sector
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 […]
COP28 and Climate Change
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 […]
Court clamps down on the abuse of business rescue proceedings as a stratagem to avoid winding-up proceedings
Business rescue proceedings are a mechanism to facilitate the rehabilitation of a company that is financially distressed. Such proceedings are primarily aimed at restoring a company to solvency that should not be abused by a company with no prospects of being rescued to avoid a winding-up or to obtain some respite from creditors. Cox Yeats […]