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If at first, you don’t succeed… keep on getting humiliated in court again?

That seems to be the mantra of a former South African president and his legal team, who suffered another defeat in court earlier this week.

The former president’s application for leave to appeal a court order handed down earlier this month, stating that he must pay his estranged wife R95 000 a month in maintenance, was dismissed with punitive costs on Tuesday.

A Constitutional Court ruling forbids naming the parties involved.

TimesLIVE reports:

The initial order was made in terms of rule 43 (interim maintenance) proceedings by Pietermaritzburg high court acting judge Barry Skinner on March 11…

Rule 43 applications cannot be appealed. They can only be varied if there has been a material change in financial circumstances.

On March 23, the former president’s lawyers appeared before judge Jerome Mnguni, who declined to deal with the application.

Then, last Friday, the lawyers were back at it:

…the former president’s lawyers launched yet another legal bid to set aside Skinner’s ruling in the form of an “application for leave to appeal” to a full bench of the KwaZulu-Natal division, or the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), arguing again that the judge had got it wrong…

When the matter was called on Tuesday, the former president’s lawyers asked for an adjournment, saying the advocate tasked to argue the matter was not available.

Skinner refused to grant the adjournment, and when the matter proceeded the lawyers said they only had instructions to argue for a postponement, not the merits.

After hearing the argument from advocate Sian Clarence, acting on behalf of the estranged wife to whom that R95 000 a month will be payable, Skinner dismissed the application with costs.

So a giant waste of time, and money, for the former president, who has argued that he already owes R13 million in legal fees, and was also being sued by VBS Bank for more than R7 million due to defaulting on bond payments.

Sounds like he’s struggling to pay back the money to me.

All the while, those legal costs mount.

They say you shouldn’t take pleasure in the misfortune of others, but I will set that aside in this case.

[source:timeslive]