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Cape Town - Absa may have to cough up R15m as a result of negligence with the account of an elderly pensioner with a "modest lifestyle".
The pensioner, Johan Fourie of Pretoria, has had a cheque account with Absa for many years. But the only transactions that have ever taken place in the account are the depositing of first his salary and then his pension.
But between November 1994 and March 2003, Fourie's cheque account was repeatedly used for cashing cheques of amounts sometimes as much as R100 000.
Then came the bombshell.
It became evident that an employee of the McCarthy motor company had committed large-scale fraud by creating false accounts at McCarthy, and making payments using McCarthy cheques and then having these cheques cashed.
The employee was a certain Mrs Cordier, whose current address is the Kroonstad prison.
All of the cheques were cashed at Absa. Cordier had concocted a story to persuade Fourie's wife to deposit cheques in her husband's account and immediately draw the money.
The unsuspecting Mrs Fourie had "received something" from Cordier as a token of appreciation for her co-operation in cashing the cheques.
McCarthy demanded the total amount involved in the fraud - R14.94m - from Absa, claiming that Absa had been negligent in cashing the cheques.
Judges of Appeal B Nugent, C Lewis, B van Heerden, E Leach and Z Tshiqi concurred that a bank normally has only two duties towards its cheque-account holders - to honour the cheques that the client writes, and to credit the client with deposits into the account.
But, declared the judges, "that's not where the story ends". If Absa had taken the trouble to start asking questions about the sudden flood of cheques being deposited into an account that normally held very little money, it would have realised in time that something was amiss.
The judges therefore ruled that McCarthy could proceed with its claim on Absa.
Absa also has to pay McCarthy's Court of Appeal legal costs.
- Sake24.com
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