Justice department’s R222m litigation bill

Statue of justice holding balanced scales in hand isolated on white background

Statue of justice holding balanced scales in hand isolated on white background

Published May 19, 2015

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Cape Town - The justice department in the past year disbursed some R222 million on litigation but this excluded money spent on court cases by departments who had briefed private counsel, director general Nonkuleleko Sindane said on Tuesday.

“We paid around R124 million to the legal profession in the broad sense but that was the department of justice,” Sindane told a media briefing ahead of the justice ministry’s budget vote in Parliament.

But she said this figure rose to roughly R222 million for the last year, when other departments came into play. However, it was not a full tally as it did not include the costs incurred by other departments and state-owned enterprises “who also use taxpayer’s money” when they briefed private counsel. The DG said she was reluctantly making the figures public because she would prefer to compute the full amount in order to account properly.

With regard to government turning to lawyers in private practice, Sindane said the department had indulged this because it was aware of weaknesses in the state’s own capacity to provide top-level counsel to departments but plans were afoot to change it.

“Not every department has been using the state attorney in the manner that is regulated in the act. Perhaps it was because of our own weaknesses as a department and specifically as the state attorney so we have kind of allowed that to happen for some time while we clean up our house.”

Masutha said this would mean bolstering the office of the state attorney “and revitalising its operations to turn it into the legal firm of choice for the state and all its institutions, including local government and paralegals”.

It would include introducing new legislation to allow for the appointment of a solicitor general, who would play the role of national director of state litigation, Masutha said.

In an aside, he remarked that the name may yet change because solicitor seemed a misnomer when it was not used elsewhere in South Africa.

The ministry also planned to use this development to drive through a new briefing policy designed to give employment and experience to black counsel, particularly, Masutha said, on complex cases.

“We will also be submitting a draft policy to transform the practice of briefing patterns which is a sore point to legal practitioners.”

The idea dates back to the tenure of Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe as justice minister, and the continued use of top-flight advocates by the state has drawn criticism that it was betraying its own transformation agenda.

ANA

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