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Cape Town - It is an "inescapable conclusion" that the Sanral board failed to make a decision to declare portions of the N1 and N2 as toll roads prior to 2014.
This was the argument of Geoff Budlender, for the City of Cape Town, in the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday.
The court was hearing the city’s application to have Sanral's decision to toll sections of the highway into Cape Town reviewed and set aside.
Budlender alleged that Sanral CEO Nazir Alli had been vague and contradictory on the matter.
He said there was no documentation of the board’s decision, as required by the SA National Roads Agency Limited Act.
“All he [Alli] says is that there was a decision and I can’t find the minutes,” Budlender said.
“It’s left, with respect, deliberately obscure because he knows if he says he forgot to minute it, the first question will be: how on earth did that happen?”
Budlender went through a nine-page bundle weighing up evidence the City believed showed the board either did or did not make a decision.
In the bundle, it referred to a memorandum from Alli to the 2014 Sanral board.
According to the bundle, Alli stated in the memo that a resolution by the board had been “inadvertently omitted” and that this now needed to be corrected.
On this, Budlender said: “With great respect, there could be no basis at all for the argument that we made a decision but didn’t take a resolution. You can’t make a decision by osmosis or in a sort of passive way.”
The lawyer concluded that all possible explanations for there being a decision despite no evidence were “utterly far-fetched”.
