Leopard's Creek borders the Kruger National Park and is situated on the banks of the Crocodile River.

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The luxurious Leopard's Creek near Malalane in Mpumalanga, which is world-renowned for hosting the Alfred Dunhill Championship.

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Sizwe sama Yende

A rural Mpumalanga municipality hired a law firm that was “deemed unfit” or inexperienced in an ongoing litigation to force mogul Johann Rupert’s company to pay market-related property rates.

The cash-strapped Nkomazi Local Municipality - which is notorious for struggling to pay salaries, overspending on overtime, and failing to provide services such as water due to rampant corruption – has been trying to get as much as possible from Leopard Creek Share Block situated near Malalane alongside the Kruger National Park.

The dispute started in 2011 when the municipality evaluated Leopard Creek at R1.4 billion and sought to cancel a 1996 agreement from which Leopard Creek enjoyed paying R35 000 year. This arrangement did not change when Parliament passed the Property Rates Act in 2004.

In 2017, the municipality claimed that Leopard Creek owed it R76.4 million in property as per its evaluation.

As the dispute raged on, Leopard Creek’s experts evaluated the property at R330 million in 2018.

Leopard Creek is known for its prime golf course that hosts the internationally acclaimed Alfred Dunhill Championship. The property comprises 335 745 hectares of undivided land, 251 residential sites divided between 80 residential riverfront sites bordering the Crocodile River, and 171 bush or golf course sites.

Leopard Creek won a Mpumalanga High Court case in 2023 that reviewed and set aside the R1.4 billion evaluation of the property after it was dissatisfied with a decision of the Ehlanzeni Evaluation Appeal Board that favoured Nkomazi municipality.

Nkomazi municipality  then challenged the judgement and failed in the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) on November 13 2024 after the SCA found that the board ignored expert opinion when it sided with the municipality about the value of the property.

R5 MILLION DOWN THE DRAIN

The Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) found in its report released this week that the municipality paid a law firm R11 million in advance to represent it on the Leopard Creek matter.

Noting a general problem financial problem, MPAC said: “There was mismanagement of funds, hence there is an overdraft that the municipality is not capable to pay due accounts in time due to lack of money.”

The committee said in the report that its attention was drawn to matter of the legal fees paid in advance, and that the law firm paid back R6 million.

“The service provider, [it] was then later discovered that is deemed unfit or not experienced enough to handle the case. Therefore, a decision was taken to end the contract with the service provider and an amount of R6 million was refunded back to the municipality,” reads the MPAC report.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has demanded that Nkomazi municipal manager, Oscar Nkosi, must institute an urgent investigation into the fruitless and wasteful expenditure emanating from the legal dispute.

“Despite this glaring financial misconduct and the municipality’s financial challenges, the ANC-led administration easily flushed R5million down the drain and there was no consequence management afterwards,” said DA councillor, Frank Shongwe.

“This goes to show that the municipality failed to conduct thorough background checks before appointing the service provide. Such negligence and financial misconduct is also setting back the municipality,” Shongwe added.

PAYING IN ADVANCE IS STANDARD PRACTICE

Nkomazi mayor, Phindile Magagula, however disputed MPAC’s finding.

“The municipality never indicated that the law firm was inexperienced. The only issue had to do with the knowledge of the case,” Magagula said.

Regarding the advance payment, she said: “It has been standard practice over the past ten years that senior counsel or legal experts involved in such complex matters require guarantees upfront that the estimate fees to run the case is secured into the trust account of the appointed attorneys.”

Magagula said that there was no need to recover the R5 million as the law firm did work to the value of the amount.

The cash-strapped municipality’s evaluation of Leopard’s Creek is almost equivalent to its annual budget, which is R1.7 billion currently. Nkomazi has small tax base from four towns – Malalane, Komatipoort, Marloth Park and Hectorspruit – and must provide free services to sprawling rural villages burdened by an influx of immigrants from the Kingdom of Eswatini and Mozambique.