April 2019

The claim in R B v Smith was based on an alleged failure by a surgeon (who performed a laparoscopic hernia repair on the appellant) to provide the appellant with sufficient information to enable her to give informed consent for the surgery which resulted in colon perforation.

There was no negligence on the surgeon’s part

English law relating to professional negligence draws an interesting distinction between whether the professional person is giving information or giving advice. This is not specifically part of South African law but it is relevant when considering liability, for instance, of brokers under the FAIS Act. The difference is between providing information for the purpose of

England’s highest court finally, after over four centuries of reported decisions on the issue, definitively held that the burden of proof lies on the carrier where cargo owners sue a ship owner for loss or damage to cargo.

If the carrier could and should have taken precautions which would have prevented some inherent characteristic of

In March 2019, the Competition Commission published its latest guidelines for the determination of administrative penalties for failure to notify mergers and implementation of mergers contrary to the Competition Act 1998.

The highest penalty to date for a failure to notify is R10 million. The methodology in the Guidelines could result in much higher figures

Extraordinarily, a case involving a passenger opening a car door and scratching a neighbouring vehicle in a supermarket carpark led to a decision before the Court of Justice of the European Union. Europe’s highest court found that this is ‘use of vehicles’ for the purposes of motor vehicle insurance.

The event happened in Latvia where

Where the purchase price of imported sugar included the import duty and the purchase price had to be reduced if the duty was reduced, the persistent claim by the seller for the unreduced amount was a repudiation and led to the lawful cancellation of the sugar contract.

Payment of the sugar contract was to be