The Road Accident Fund (RAF) on Friday received a roasting from acting Western Cape Judge President Jeanette Traverso for apparently lying over its plan to go over to a direct payment system.
Traverso was handing down her reasons for her order last week granting the Law Society of South Africa and two other applicants an interim interdict against the introduction of the system.
Her decision, which puts on hold the RAF plan to pay compensation to claimants directly, rather than through their lawyers, has drawn sharp criticism from the fund, unions and the South African Communist Party.
The RAF announced the plan last month, with a view to putting it into operation on August 11.
In her written judgement, Traverso said the RAF was a public body mandated by the Constitution to maintain a high ethical standard and foster transparency by providing timely and accurate information.
She said the RAF appeared to have withheld information from the public, including claimants, by keeping secret its decision to go over to direct payment after it was made in October last year.
”It in fact, it held out to the first and second applicants [the Law Society of South Africa and the South African Association of Personal Injury Lawyers] that no decision had been made,” she said.
”The inference is irresistible that, in implementing the DPS [direct payment system] in the manner that it has done, it endeavoured to thwart any attempt to have the lawfulness of the DPS considered by a court before it was implemented.”
She said direct payment would by its very nature deprive thousands of indigent and other litigants of access to justice.
”A court should not permit an organ of state to deprive litigants of access to justice,” she said.
She said the RAF had been ”hell-bent” on paying compensation directly to clients regardless of existing agreements.
This would prevent attorneys from making binding agreements with clients to safeguard their own interests when they advanced funds to, or undertook work on behalf of, those clients.
To suggest, as the RAF had, that the practice of looking to their clients for payment of attorney and client costs amounted to theft, fraud or overreaching was unfounded.
”The first respondent’s attitude in this regard is without any foundation and displays a lamentable lack of appreciation of how the practice of law functions,” she said.
Traverso said the RAF had acted with ”continuing disregard” for the effect on courts of the direct payment decision by directing that trials go ahead where a claimant did not have a bank account or provide the RAF with its details.
This would result in trials running even where all the issues between parties could be settled, and was an abuse of both courts and claimants.
To show the court’s displeasure at this, she had ordered that the RAF pay costs in the matter, even before it had been finalised. — Sapa