Durban - Feuding former neighbours, who between them scored R185 million in a once-in-a-lifetime cash property deal with a businessman with ties to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, are embroiled in a heated legal battle with one claiming he is owed R5 million for introducing the businessman to the other.
Squaring up before Durban High Court Judge Piet Koen are international pharmaceutical advertising guru Martin Sherwood and Michelle Mauvis, the wife of Durban restaurant owner Robert Mauvis.
Sherwood claims he introduced Michelle Mauvis to Dr Robert Mhlanga - who is said to be Mugabe’s former personal pilot and who has huge stakes in diamond mining - and this resulted in Mhlanga paying R100 million for her 7ha plot on the border of the plush Zimbali Estate on the North Coast, which she had bought 20 years before for R100 000.
He says it was understood by both them, Mhlanga and their attorneys, that he would get a 5% “commission” for the introduction, but Mauvis flatly denies this and refuses to pay.
“It is an issue of principle for me rather than anything else,” Sherwood said during his evidence on the first day of the trial on Monday.
“I feel very let down.”
The case has exposed details of Mhlanga’s property “shopping trip” during which he paid highly inflated prices for several properties in the Durban area.
Sherwood’s 7ha, for which Mhlanga paid R85 million, came with development rights, a mansion and a stunning view over Zimbali’s golf course and the sea.
But Mauvis’s property was zoned agricultural land, only had a small shop and pottery and had a less attractive view.
Mhlanga, while prepared to give an affidavit confirming that he was aware of the alleged 5% deal, says he is not in South Africa and cannot testify.
Mauvis’s lawyers are fighting the admissibility of his affidavit, saying it would be “immensely prejudicial” because he cannot be cross-examined.
“There is circumstantial evidence that an assessment of his character through cross-examination would be warranted in this regard… there has been intimation that the purchases may have been part of a money laundering scheme.
“He then embarked on significant alterations which resulted in litigation where he was accused of showing disregard for town planning and building regulations,” Mauvis says in her opposing affidavit.
It was agreed that the issue would be dealt with at a later stage, and that Mhlanga’s attorney Paul Casasola would be called to testify.
In his evidence in chief, Sherwood said his relationship with Mauvis had been fraught since she had sided with Moreland in a court dispute over access to his property “which cost me in the region of R2 million” and had resulted in his land being less valuable in terms of development.
In 2009, he approached several estate agents to sell his house because the children had grown up and he was moving to Johannesburg for business.
An agent introduced him to a “Jasooda” who introduced him to Mhlanga, whom he described as “charismatic”.
After signing the sale agreement, Mhlanga asked if he could set up a meeting with the owner of the property next door because he was keen to buy it.
“I told him that I was not on great speaking terms with her (Mauvis) but I would ask her as long as I got an introduction fee. I thought it would be a way of recovering the R2 million.”
He said he had always made this clear to Mauvis and her husband at subsequent meetings and had got his attorney to put it in writing to Mauvis’s attorney and to include it in the sale agreement.
But the initial agreement - for the sale of 4ha of the land for about R60 million - was never finalised and he later discovered that Mauvis eventually sold the entire property for R100 million using a different attorney.
The case is continuing.
The Mercury