The legal battle between wildlife filmmaker John Varty and foreign investors Li Quan and Stuart Bray over a controversial tiger project, will resume next week after the Johannesburg High Court postponed their ‘cat-fight’ case on Tuesday.
Varty and his brother Dave are asking for a range of court orders against Quan and Bray regarding their share in the Tiger Moon wildlife sanctuary outside Philippolis in the Free State.
The Vartys want, among other things, an order allowing them to release their two Bengal tigers into a 5 000 ha camp on the sanctuary. They are also asking that a curator be appointed to manage the jointly owned company Tiger Moon Sanctuary due to the disputes between them, Quan and Bray.
Quan and Bray have, in turn, brought a counter-application, asking the court to evict the two Bengal tigers from the Philippolis sanctuary.
The Vartys are establishing the multimillion-rand Tiger Moon Sanctuary, straddling the Orange River between the Free State and Northern Cape. It is aimed at the rehabilitation of captive-bred tigers to be released into the wild.
Quan and Bray, a London-based married couple, invested heavily in the project. They are now accusing the Vartys of defrauding them of a substantial part of their invested millions.
They believe the two Bengal tigers on the sanctuary pose a threat to the more endangered South China tiger cubs that are to be moved there shortly from Asia.
The Vartys earlier obtained the captive-bred Bengal tigers from a Canadian zoo.
They claim to have rehabilitated them in the past few years sufficiently for release into the wild, where they will not threaten South China cubs. – Sapa