Johannesburg - The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse has negotiated an agreement with the South African National Roads Agency Limited, putting all summonses against Outa members for non-payment of e-tolls on hold until after the completion of a test-case process that started in June 2016.
Until then, all Outa members - and people who join up between now and then - who are represented by Outa's legal team are provisionally immune from prosecution for refusing to pay e-tolls. And that could realistically take anything up to two years, said chairman Wayne Duvenage.
"Our aim is to show that e-tolling is unlawful in the test case, and if we succeed the stay of legal claims will become permanent."
The bad news, however, is that Sanral refused to extend the stay of prosecution to the public at large, clearly indicating that it intends to continue summonsing people and business other than Outa members while the test case is in progress, even though the prosecutions will fall away if the agency loses the test case.
"You'd think Sanral would stop chasing e-toll defaulters until the Outa test case was settled," said Duvenage, "but it seems they intend to carry on summonsing e-toll defaulters and continuing legal action regardless.
"More worrying for Sanral, however, is that all their summons issued between March 2016 and mid-August were so full of errors that we maintain they're invalid because their declarations don't conform to the rules of court."
"Until the authorities stop listening to Sanral's nonsense and pull the plug on e-tolling, Outa will continue to fight for the rights of society and do whatever it takes to put an end to the e-toll debacle."