Dlamini may face 3 years in jail
August 16, 2009
By Wiseman Khuzwayo
Absa intends to apply to the North Gauteng High Court to have controversial Swazi prince Dumisa Dlamini sent to prison for three years for contempt of court, the bank said on Thursday.
Marthinus van Rensburg, of Absa's legal department, said Dlamini had been declared a vexatious litigant in 2007. This means that Dlamini cannot institute legal proceedings against anyone without first getting the permission from the Judge President of the North Gauteng High Court.
Between 1998 and 2007 Dlamini filed 26 applications against Absa. Van Rensburg said Dlamini was committed to 120 days in prison for contempt of court. He was arrested on October 29, 2008, committed to prison on November 4, 2008, and served 24 days before being released on parole.
According to court documents, on October 23, 2007, Absa obtained a court order by Judge Pierre Rabie that Dlamini be declared a vexatious litigant. But the order stated that the bank had 20 court days to make an application for relief in terms of the Vexatious Proceedings Act.
On November 19, 2007, Judge Willem van der Merwe declared the operation of the order was in full force pending the final determination of Dlamini's application for leave to appeal.
On December 7, 2007, Dlamini was interdicted by Pretoria High Court Judge Willie Hartzenberg from litigating against Absa.
On January 25 last year, Hartzenberg found that Dlamini, by placing two matters against Absa on the court roll, was in contempt of Van Der Merwe's order. He also found him to be in contempt of Rabie's order.
However, on April 30 last year, Acting Judge AML Phatudi found, in an application brought by Geelspruit Boere, one of Dlamini's companies, against FNB and others, that there was no indication that Absa had either instituted the application declaring Dlamini vexatious or that the bank had caused his arrest and detention pending confirmation by the court.
Van Rensburg said Absa would be making an application to stop the deeds office at the Department of Land Affairs from acting on incorrect information from Dlamini and to get him committed to imprisonment for contempt of court.
Happy Ntshingila, the executive director of marketing and communications at Absa, said: "My job is to protect the Absa brand. Where the law is involved and he (Dlamini) invokes it for what he is doing, we must invoke the same law as well."
At issue are 14 sugar cane farms in Mpumalanga that belonged to Dlamini, which were liquidated by Absa for R13 million, which it said Dlamini owed it.
Dlamini, on the other hand, has consistently maintained that he had never borrowed money from Absa. He has said that Absa must have been owed the money by the close corporation (CC) which cloned his own, Kleindoornkop Boerdery, at the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (Cipro).
The liquidators' report, that was to be submitted to the general meeting of creditors, which was to be held before a magistrate in Nelspruit on February 27, 2004, referred to Peter Joseph Hefferman, and not Dlamini, as the member of Kleindoornkop.
Dlamini has said that this therefore vindicated him.
Cipro has admitted that Dlamini had been removed as a member of his CC.
In 2002, the North Gauteng High Court ordered that Dlamini's assets, which had been put under voluntary liquidation, be restored to him. In 2006, he was reinstated by Cipro as the sole member of Kleindoornkop.
Emile van der Merwe, a private investigator who has been assisting Dlamini, denied that he had ever been in prison at the instigation of Absa.
He said in July last year that Absa had handed Dlamini over to a sheriff when he was at the bank's headquarters in a bid to have him imprisoned. But when the sheriff tried to hand him to the warders at Johannesburg Prison, they refused to accept him as there were no police papers motivating the arrest.
Responding to a letter from Dlamini's son Tiven Nkosi, ED Groenewald, national commissioner at the SAPS legal administration, wrote on November 24, 2008 that neither an application nor an order had been served on their office or on the State Attorney's. "This will be forwarded to the State Attorney's office with instructions to apply for rescission," they said.
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