Zimbabwe govt bid to save SA property 'futile'

Zimbabwe will have a tough time trying to recover a property it owned in Cape Town, South Africa, which was sold by public auction last Monday.

Although the courts had given Zimbabwe six months to settle the legal bills of a group of evicted white farmers, the money from Harare apparently arrived only after the sale had been concluded.

Afriforum, which represented the farmers in the case, said it did receive the cash, but several hours after an auctioneer had knocked the property down for R3,7 million and the transfer of the property in Salisbury Road, Kenilworth went ahead this week.

Willie Spies, representing 78 white farmers evicted from their farms in Zimbabwe after 2000, on Friday said the money from Zimbabwe to settle the farmers' legal bills turned up in his account at 5pm on Monday, hours after the property had been sold.

"The Zimbabwe government could have paid this any time from February when final bills were drawn up," Spies said. "I have a paper trail of this."

The Southern African Development Community Tribunal ruled in 2008 that the 78 white farmers had been discriminated against by race as only whites had been evicted from their farms by President Robert Mugabe's government.

The tribunal also said they should be paid compensation for their losses, though it did not say how much.

When the farmers tried to enforce the Sadc ruling in Harare, Zimbabwe said the tribunal's judgement was null and void as it had no jurisdiction in Zimbabwe.

So the farmers turned to South Africa to seek compensation for their legal costs.

Represented by Afriforum, they found a building in Cape Town which belonged to the Zimbabwean government.

They said it was rented out on a commercial basis and so was not protected by diplomatic immunity.

After a long court battle with the government, the farmers won the right to sell the building to recover their legal costs, both in the tribunal and those incurred since then in the SA courts.