"We're all going on a summer holiday..." (Cliff Richard)

With the Festive Season (and our Summer Holidays!) well and truly upon us, you may be inviting family or friends to visit you from overseas with their children, or perhaps you are a foreigner planning a family trip to South Africa. Either way here's some good news in the form of a welcome concession from government in regard to the documentation you will need to produce on entry.

In a nutshell foreign children until now have only been able to enter the country with unabridged birth certificates and consent letters. That requirement was waived - for accompanied children only (check the full details in the table below) - from 8 November 2019.

"He who hesitates is lost" (Wise old proverb)

In January 2019 new amendments to Regulations for the replacement of lost title deeds (and similar documents like mortgage bonds and notarial bonds - see below) were published. They were very onerous and slated to come into effect at short notice, but after criticism they were suspended - until now.

The CIPC (Companies and Intellectual Property Commission) has announced that its new "compliance checklist" requirement, voluntary until now, becomes mandatory for all companies and close corporations from 1 January 2020.

You must complete the checklist before submitting your annual return. So firstly check when your due date for the annual return is - for companies you will have 30 business days from the day after its date of registration, whereas for close corporations you will have the two months from the first day of the registration month until the end of the following month.

"If you don't like where you are, move. You are not a tree" (Jim Rohn)

The upcoming festive season, with its mass migrations of happy holiday-makers to their dream destinations, has always been a busy time for both sellers and buyers. 

In these hard times however, an increasing number of sellers are feeling pressured to accept offers well under their expectations, so cases of "seller's remorse" are much more likely now than they have been for many years. The question is, just how easy or difficult is it for a seller to escape a sale agreement signed in haste?

Equally common no doubt are sales "subject to the sale of the buyer's property" - for a specified amount and within a specified time period. That raises an important question - must the buyer's transfer actually be registered in the Deeds Office within the deadline period, or is enough that the buyer has signed a sale agreement for his/her property?

A recent High Court decision addressed both those questions, as well as two others relating to defences raised by a seller who changed her mind shortly after accepting the buyer's offer (the judgment doesn't say why she changed her mind, but the fact that a bank offered the buyers a bond of R3.9m suggests that the sale price of R2.6m may have been very low).