The City of Cape Town is reviewing the multimillion-rand, five-year contract it awarded to SA Rugby boss Brian van Rooyen's Labat Traffic Solutions after acknowledging that more than 44 000 camera fines the company has issued are illegal.
The city is also investigating whether it will pay back more than R2-million to the motorists who have paid invalid camera fines.
Following intense media pressure about the thousands of erroneous traffic fines issued by Labat in Cape Town and the Helderberg, the city announced on Monday night that it would be considering a report from its chief legal adviser at the next executive mayor and mayoral committee meeting later this month.
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Labat won the contract in May 2004 to issue and serve traffic fines in the unicity. Up until Monday night city officials had claimed the company's computerised system was "95 percent on track" and that the errors in the traffic fines were simply teething problems.
'All appointed certificates have to be withdrawn' Among the errors court and administration sources say they are seeing on the traffic summonses include the manipulation of dates, the duplication of vehicle registration - correct registration but wrong vehicle - and a lack of recorded personal details.
The director of public prosecutions has issued a directive saying that in the case of camera offences, all first notices have to be mailed to a motorist within 30 days of the date of the offence, failing which the ticket will be invalid.
"Batches of camera notices where the offence took place during... October 2004 were mailed to the public, but did not comply with the 30-days mailing directive," the city statement said.
"The city is now advised that 2 915 notices (involving) R652 775 were not compliant. This is being verified and checked by the city."
The city has also been advised that 44 449 first notices of camera offences were not printed and, instead of the legal process being complied with, the second notices were mailed.
'Now all the summons servers have to be authorised by our legal services department'
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