/ 23 October 2007

PetroSA-Imvume court file ‘not mislaid’

The Johannesburg High Court has not mislaid the file in the matter between PetroSA and Imvume Management, the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development said on Tuesday.

”The file is in fact in the possession of the registrar of the filing section of the Johannesburg High Court …,” department spokesperson Zolile Nqayi said in a statement.

He was reacting to a newspaper report that the court could not find the case file in PetroSA’s R11-million claim against Imvume Management for allegedly defaulting on repayments of an advance paid over to the African National Congress.

”The file … was never mislaid, nor has it disappeared as claimed,” said Nqayi.

The Star reported that instead of the full case file, the court’s civil case registry ”has only an empty file cover created on October 5, marked ‘duplicate file”’. Officials could not explain what had happened.

Nqayi said the file was with the registrar ”for the issuing of the court order” following the court’s October 12 decision to strike the matter from the roll.

”The high-profile nature of the case necessitated that the registrar, who is the head of the filing section, should be in charge of the file in question in order to minimise the risk of it going missing,” he said.

Once a file was presented to the court it was usual for the outcome to be endorsed on the file by the judge’s secretary, after which the file was returned to the typing section, then given to a registrar for the issuing of the court order, a process which normally took five days.

”The department acknowledges that there are challenges with regard to the management of records in courts and offices,” said Nqayi.

”The problem is compounded by the lack of sufficient accommodation and storage space in the older courts,” he said, adding that the department would try to solve the problem by replacing existing shelving with mobile shelving.

An unnamed senior official in the registry reportedly told the Star it was technically impossible to track a file on the court’s computer system once it had left the registry.

The newspaper carried cellphone photographs of files stacked against the walls of a court passage ”where anyone can rummage through them”. — Sapa