We have all heard all the stories involving Harvey Weinstein and various other producers and directors.  For most actresses it has clearly taken a lot more than just acting ability to get a role in a movie and that is tragic.  I do think however some of the cases will never see a courtroom.  In particular, there was a British case involving a lady who claims that she went to a hotel in 2010 and was raped by him, she went back in 2014 and was raped again by him, and after all of that she went back again in 2015 and was raped for the third time.  That is the kind of case where prosecutors are in a very difficult position.  Don’t prosecute the case and there will be a whole lot of people that would say there is yet another woman’s case which has been ignored and not taken seriously.  Prosecute it and any competent lawyer will rip the lady’s story to absolute shreds asking why on earth, if after she was raped the first time, she went back the second time and worse, went back the third time?  The entire suggestion, and it will be very hard to refute, will be that essentially she understood that that is how she was getting her movie roles and that ultimately it was not rape.  I might be mischaracterising what has been reported in the newspaper, but I very much doubt if we will ever see a court case involving that particular instance.  It just, from a criminal law point of view, has zero prospect of success.  

I would like to know what you think.  Do you think that somebody who alleges she was raped on three occasions, 5 years apart, and kept going back to the same man’s hotel and going into his hotel room, and then taking parts in his movies after the alleged rapes, is likely to succeed with a claim of rape? 

I spent a weekend in Cape Town recently for the Sun Met, and as we all know, there are tremendous water shortages there.  What surprised me was that apparently some people in Cape Town itself are not fully aware of the problems.  Whatever story has been covered now in the New York Times and on the BBC will hardly be good for tourism.  They are showing pictures of people lining up for water and that the day when the water will be cut off, the so-called zero day, is now meant to be in May.  Barring some miraculous rains, things are not looking good for Cape Town at all and one wonders what on earth will be done.  Is this the global warming we are now seeing first-hand?  Either way, suddenly all of those people who have moved to Cape Town may not exactly be thinking it was the right time to be there.  There is nothing that glamorous about having to queue to go and get a bucket of 50 litres of water, and basically they are only a few weeks away from that shocking reality.

The way the story has been covered around the rest of the world is basically that Cape Town will be the first major international city in the entire world to run out of water.  I have heard of drones being used in some golf estates to monitor whether or not people are using too much water and fine them, the BBC had footage of guys that were washing cars, which is against the law, being arrested and having all their equipment confiscated and at Cape Town International Airport, there were no running taps in the toilets, with a sanitiser instead and signs indicating that this was due to the water shortage. 

The whole saga of Markus Jooste and Steinhof caught me totally by surprise.  Firstly, I was an investor in Steinhof, but sold my shares in 2015.  I made good money in Steinhof shares because the first time I bought they were at R11 and I sold them at about R27.  Subsequently they went the whole way up to R70 and I think now they are back at about R5.  

Unlike a lot of people who say all sorts of things about Markus, I actually knew Markus very well.  I bought the same watch he had, after sending him an e-mail about what watch he was wearing, because I happen to like it, and I spent 6 years on the Racing Association Committee with him. That would mean that I was one of 6 people who would sit in meetings six times a year with Markus for 4 or 5 hours a time.  In other words, I did not just bump into him at a horseracing meeting and speak to him for 30 minutes but I have probably spent 150 to 200 hours of my life in the same meetings and same rooms as Markus, generally in a small group of 6 people.  

I can still say, whether that is embarrassing or not, he is the most intimidating and intelligent man I have ever come across.  What that has led to and what it is that he has allegedly done, I don’t know, but I can only tell you that he is exceptionally intelligent and if, for example, he started talking about company law or certain fields of law, I as a lawyer would very quickly realise he knew a lot more than any lawyers I know on those topics.  I know from friends that a number of other South African billionaires who knew Markus, including those who invested with him such as Christo Wiese, also considered Markus the most intelligent man that they had ever known.   I don’t know what comes next in the story, I don’t know what the future holds and I don’t know whether this is outright fraud or a manipulation of tax laws.  What is obvious is that whatever it is, flew right over the heads of the South African authorities and the only reason this has come out and the only reason there is a problem is because Steinhof is also listed on the German Stock Exchange.  I wonder, if they had stayed on the South African Stock Exchange whether any of whatever it is, and at the moment everybody is just speculating, would ever have come out?  When you read books like The President’s Keepers, all you do is read about how so many institutions of State had been absolutely destroyed by Zuma and his cronies and would not be capable of investigating some white collar crime, if that is what this is. 

I am really enjoying watching the Winter Olympics in South Korea at the moment.  There are some sports I cannot relate to, but ice-skating is a beautiful, high pressure sport and it is tremendously exciting to watch the snowboarders.  Downhill skiing looks completely crazy and the fastest I have ever skied at is about 60km/h which to me was frighteningly fast so I am really amazed at these daredevils!  So many of the events are just more exciting or fun than the summer Olympics and I really enjoy watching them.  The Olympics are not on at times that really suit South Africans, but the repeats are well worth watching.  Are any of you are currently watching the Winter Olympics from PyeongChang.

I think we are all generally delighted to say goodbye to Jacob Zuma.  I know he says he is very popular with a certain element within the ANC, but I would imagine it is more limited than he thinks it is, and limited largely to those who benefitted with him.

I think that popularity will also diminish as more and more is written and comes out about what happened during his presidency.  South Africa has really been taken to a bad place politically and it is going to take some amazing work to get it back from where it has been dragged down to.  Goodbye Jacob Zuma and may we never have as bad a leader as you in the new South Africa ever again.

I was quite impressed to read that the CVS Group in America would stop airbrushing images on its beauty products.  They say in future they will start showing a watermark on images that have not been airbrushed so that you know what the model really looks like the picture, because most of the time the star or model does not.  I think that is a great idea because quite honestly, we live in a world where there is way too much pressure, especially on young people, to try and look like stars and they just don’t realise that they cannot even begin to look like a star because not even the star looks like their own photos!  Photoshop is a masterful programme and pictures are slimmed down, lines removed, freckles and bumps erased and it sometimes gets to absolutely ridiculous extremes.  

They say it is time to start reducing the amount of airbrushing and that the company needs to be more transparent and authentic, with the women who come into their stores to buy beauty products.  I think it is a great idea.  What do you think?

I think the most important thing that anybody can do for their children is to give them a love for reading.  I grew up in a house where reading the newspaper daily has always been encouraged, and more than that I had my Gran, who was a school teacher, basically tutor me up until when she died when I was in Std 4, which was a huge blow in my life.  I have never written about my Gran before, but she was particularly influential in my life and I used to sleep at her house once a week and spent most of Saturday with her and my grandfather, who I think was her fourth husband.  She was a very good woman and she died 6 months after retiring – for example, when I used to speak to one of my former staff members who had subsequently died, Abey, and he always used to tell me he was going to retire - I always told him that I am very nervous of retirement because one of the most special people in my life died immediately after retirement.  

Obviously, some of you who go through my blog travel and travel quite a bit internationally, but I wanted to confine this blog to your favourite holiday destinations in South Africa.  It does not necessarily have to be the beauty of Cape Town or the relaxation of a camp within the Kruger Park (some of the finest value for money holidays that you could ever have).  Maybe it is just a beach house somewhere along a more deserted piece of the coast, etc.  I want to know from you what your favourite holiday spots in South Africa are?  

From my perspective, and we did not have much money when I grew up and we used to go on a lot of caravan holidays, which I have to tell you, from a teenage point of view, are probably about the best holidays you can go on.  There are a lot of teenagers in caravan parks, it is a pretty good way to meet quite a few people and it is lots of fun.  I did not enjoy having to wash dishes after braais and the skottel always takes a lot of effort to clean properly, but I have really fond memories of three week holidays by various beaches on the Natal South Coast – and we generally avoided the two busy places and went further away from the big cities - as well as many in the mountains.  

I guess I tried to look for similar holiday spots for my children – alternating between the mountains, which I love, because quite a few of the holidays when I was around 10 to 13 years old were spent in the Drakensberg Mountains and beach holidays.  Insofar as saving money is concerned, beach holidays are probably the best way to go, because honestly, you give children a little bit of sand and sea and that is them taken care of for 10 or 12 hours.  They do of course have risks, and I recall on one particular day at Umhlanga Rocks seeing two bodies of what I understood to be children aged about 12 years old covered with the silver foil wrappings after they had fallen off rocks, knocked themselves unconscious and drowned, but you are probably equally at risk of being bitten by snakes in the mountains, so you cannot completely avoid risk either.  Not to mention, statistically of course, that every time your children are driving in your car with you, you are probably more at danger than being at the seaside with them.  What are your favourite holiday destinations?  It does not necessarily have to be a specific named place, but it can be a general type of holiday.

When I go through all the new cases that come into our firm, and we don’t do as many now, with the changed law, as we did before 2008, I see what works in attracting new clients.  What works better than anything else is ultimately word of mouth.  

The vast majority of our referrals come from people who have been previous clients or know previous clients of us. Sure, they hear the adverts, they know our adverts and you are familiar with them, but in a time when many of our competitors are sending around touts to people’s houses to sign them up, it is very helpful to be able to rely on word of mouth.  As a result, the clients that we have are typically a lot more sophisticated than firms of attorneys who use touts more extensively, because the more sophisticated people are less susceptible to touts.  A variety of promises are made to people, and we certainly come across people who are with other attorneys who were induced to sign up with them, by those attorneys claiming that they either work with us or that we represent the Road Accident Fund and they will represent the client, but settle the case with our firm.  In other words, they blatantly mislead and lie to the clients in order to sign them up.  Touting is considered unethical by the legal profession and can lead to considerable trouble for an attorney if they are exposed for this type of behaviour.  

Another risk that these attorneys take is that many of the touts are involved with selling fraudulent claims to one firm after another. Those attorneys that do work with touts expose themselves to the risk of dealing with these fraudulent cases including the loss of money that they invest in medico legal reports, etc for those cases, not to mention buying them.  

I recently did a customer service survey for an international airline.  It had all the usual questions, and I don’t fill in these surveys unless they are very short, but it had one critical question.  It is a question that everybody should ask of themselves and the service they give and that is they asked me if “Would you hire the person who you spoke to on the phone if you owned a customer service company?”  I found the customer service company part quite interesting because I would imagine any company where people have to take calls from the public has to be a customer service company – whether they are doctors, engineers or the like.  

The bottom line is, if somebody would not want to hire you, based on the way you dealt with them on a phone call, you probably should not be talking to customers in the first place.  That question is so much more important than the usual questions as to whether or not you were satisfied with the outcome of the call, etc.  Other questions they had to ask included whether I agreed that the person I spoke to understood the reason for my call and showed that he/she cared and valued my time.  

There has been a tremendous move with people from Johannesburg and Durban moving into the Western Cape in recent years.  In fact, the move has been so dramatic that high-end properties in Gauteng have for a number of years not really been going up, whereas in the Cape sales have been booming.  The Cape has its own problems including severe water shortages and the prices there are beginning to price people out of the market as well, but there is no doubt, if nothing else, that the Cape is the place where people with money ultimately retire.  All sorts of middle-class people are also being drawn to the Cape for a variety of reasons including the fact that it is a very well managed Province and Cape Town in particular as one of the best managed cities in South Africa.  That is apart from the natural beauty of the Cape.  I love the Cape and in fact all of my racehorses, apart from Master Sabina, are now based with my trainers in the Cape, the Snaith’s, and I love to find any excuse to go to Cape Town.  

A lot of the sales are in areas like Rondebosch, Claremont, Plumstead and Wineberg in the R2,5 million price range.  Finally, here is the price growth – the Western Cape prices have grown 53,7% over the last 5 years and Gauteng has grown 24,7%.  In other words, the Cape is growing twice as fast as Gauteng.  I think though, before this move becomes a stampede, it is going to require one or two big companies like Discovery for example to announce a head office or a big move of say 5,000 or 6,000 staff, etc and until then, the Cape is going to struggle with actually having the jobs to provide to all of the people that are trying to move there at the moment.  It doesn’t have the major companies and that’s what is missing from its future growth.

Honolulu in Hawaii has come up with a new law to address the problems of people who text and walk while they cross streets.  Anybody doing that now gets a $35 fine.  I think that is a pretty good idea, although it is something I have been guilty of myself in the past.  We all are just so glued to our phones these days that we don’t realise how dangerous it is.  I think if in South Africa we had to pay R475 every time we were caught texting, while crossing a street, we might take it a little bit more seriously.  On the other hand, there are so many people who don’t pay fines and don’t follow any rules that it might not worry them.