Monthly Archives: February 2020

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Running a Business in a Residential Area – Check Your Zoning First!

“It is unquestionable that an owner of land is not permitted to perform activities which contravene the restrictive title conditions or the zoning restrictions” (extract from judgment below) You decide to open a home business, or perhaps you are about to buy a house in order to run a business from it. You apply for rezoning but the council is taking forever to decide (although it has happily started charging you rates and taxes on the business tariff), your immediate neighbours

Watch What You Say on WhatsApp – The Case of the R20m Lottery Win and the R1m “Offer”

“Engage brain before hitting send” (Anon) WhatsApp comes with a host of business and personal benefits, and its use is growing exponentially here as in the rest of the world. Which brings us to a possible downside – binding yourself to a legally-enforceable agreement without really meaning to. First principles: Offer + Acceptance = Contract What makes for a binding contract? In the most simplistic sense, all you need is for one person to make an offer and for another to accept that

How to Stop an Ex-Director from Competing With You

“…the default position is that an executive director or a senior employee may not carry on business activities which fall within the scope of his company’s business during the time when he serves as director or works as employee.  The default position however changes on resignation.” (Extract from judgment below) What happens if relations between you and your fellow company directors sour to the extent that a director leaves? Can he or she immediately open up a new business in direct

POPIA’s One Year Deadline to Start Running on 1 April?

Will the main provisions of POPIA (the Protection of Personal Information Act) really commence on 1 April 2020 as media reports suggest, or is this just another case of Crying Wolf? This time it seems it may be the real thing, with the Information Regulator having formally requested the President to declare the commencement date. If that does indeed happen (still unclear at date of writing), any organisation that needs to comply with POPIA will have a one year transitional period

Website of the Month: South Africa in the 2020s – High Road or Low?

“Will the 20s roar like they did in the last century or will the outcome be different?” (Clem Sunter) What exactly is in store for us South Africans in the Twenty-Twenties? It’s a vital question not only for business and for investors, but for us all on the most personal level. Of course it’s also a question that’s a lot easier to ask than to answer. As Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr put it: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s