Your Dormant Trust Is Not Invisible to SARS
Trusts remain a valuable estate planning and asset protection tool, but they also carry ongoing compliance obligations. Many trustees assume that a dormant trust with no income, assets, or activity can simply be left alone.
SARS has made it clear that inactivity does not remove a trust’s compliance obligations. With penalties now being imposed for outstanding trust returns, dormant trusts may be attracting more attention than their trustees realise.
How to Protect Your Company from Unlawful Springboarding
Your top employee resigns and immediately opens up a new business in direct opposition to you. Using your software, your client relationships and your business methods to springboard their new start-up and poach your clients.
We discuss, in the context of a recent High Court case, how our law can help you put a stop to that sort of unfair competition. And we share some tips on how to protect yourself from it in the future.
Married Out of Community of Property? You May Still Be Entitled to a Share
Couples who sign antenuptial contracts often believe they have permanently settled the question of money in their marriage. What is mine stays mine. What is yours stays yours.
Not so fast. The Constitutional Court recently expanded access to redistribution orders for spouses married out of community of property without accrual, particularly where strict enforcement of an antenuptial contract would produce unfair financial consequences at divorce. A 2025 KwaZulu-Natal High Court judgment shows what the redistribution remedy can deliver in practice.
Estate Planning: The Ambush Tax Lurking in the Wings
We all know that a comprehensive estate plan, with a carefully crafted will at its heart, is essential to ensure that we’re on track to leave our loved ones financially secure. And that of course requires us to quantify not only our assets, but also the costs that our estate will have to pay out of those assets before any distribution can find its way to our heirs.
In assessing those costs, don’t forget the tax angle – the taxman gets his cut in death as in life! In this article, we’ll focus on a cost that can be substantial but is easily overlooked: Capital Gains Tax (CGT). We’ll even show you how to calculate the estate’s likely CGT.
Reckless Lending: You Could Lose Everything
Before you make a loan to anyone, be sure to comply fully with the strict requirements of the National Credit Act.
If you don’t, you could lose your loan entirely, with a recent High Court decision providing a stark reminder of the consequences. The Court declared a R430,000 loan to have been “reckless lending”, leaving the lender (a family trust) to write off the bulk of its loan, lose a decade’s worth of interest, cancel its security bond over a house, and pay legal costs. Why did that happen and how can you, as a lender, avoid the same fate?
She Fell Out of a Safari Vehicle: When Disclaimers Fail
Think a disclaimer will protect your business from liability? Not so fast. Our courts have made it clear that a disclaimer is only enforceable where consent is properly obtained, risks are clearly disclosed, and the wording is specific enough to cover the conduct in question.
These principles matter for businesses operating in high-risk environments, and for consumers who may assume they have signed away more rights than they actually have. A case brought by a woman who fell from her safari vehicle in Botswana illustrates this point.