An Mpumalanga black empowerment group says French car maker Peugeot took them for a ride by using their black faces and names to start a dealership that was always going to fail. The dealership is now closed and the two parties are at war over who owns the corporate identity wares, such as the signage and furniture. The failed car dealership raises questions of black empowerment exploitation.

The president should not have the power to impose sentences because it is unconstitutional and blurs the separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive, the Johannesburg High Court ruled this week. Judge Kathy Satchwell found section 1(5) of the Criminal Law Amendment Act’s — allowing the president the power to re-sentence prisoners previously sentenced to death — offensive to the Constitution.

The re-election of Patrice Motsepe as head of the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce (Nafcoc) for two more years means that the anti-Motsepe faction must find a leader willing to put his or her money where his or her mouth is. Despite gripes about the Nafcoc head, Motsepe’s re-election proves that his power and influence is still acknowledged.

After almost a month as number 2070 in a morgue fridge, Simon Mangaliso Radebe will recapture his humanity on Saturday when he is buried at the Roodeport Cemetery in Soweto. Radebe made headlines after Johannesburg paramedics allegedly refused to take him in their ambulance because he was ”too dirty”and flea-ridden. Radebe died in the Johannesburg city centre where the paramedics had left him.

The Johannesburg Equality Court has found the Gauteng transport and public works department (Gautrans) guilty of favouring white big business at the expense of black-owned concerns, despite the department’s affirmative procurement policies. The judgement marks the first time that a government department has been taken to court over its affirmative procurement policies.

Minister of Correctional Services Ngconde Balfour said this week he is so ”gatvol” with corrupt warders who let prisoners escape that he will henceforth disregard procedures, suspend them without pay and then fire them. ”They can waste as much money as they want on Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration,” he said. ”At the end of the day, they will be the ones left without assets, not me.”

The wheels of justice are grinding too slowly for the liking of a Johannesburg civil engineering company which has accused the Gauteng Department of Public Works and Transport of discriminating against black firms. Manong and Associates has written a letter to the Magistrate’s Commission expressing its unhappiness with the slowness of the judicial process.

Johannesburg prison inmate Brenda Wardle scored a partial victory this week when the Johannesburg High Court ordered that the parole board hearing her application for early release be reconvened. The provincial commissioner of correctional services and the chairperson of the parole hearing have been ordered to ensure that Wardle is given a fair hearing and an opportunity to make her case.