The American election is only a few weeks away now, and the race has certainly got a lot closer. Barack Obama did not have a great first debate, but came back in the second one and on intrade.com they now say he has a 64% chance of winning, but that figure really changes all the time. At once stage he got as high as 75% in recent times and after the first debate his figure dropped to as low as 60%, so it does show you that any small slip-up can lead to fairly dramatic swings.

At this time the Republicans are getting a little bit desperate, trying to invent almost any story they can, whether it is about failure to look after Embassy staff in Libya, which must be fairly dangerous and out of the control of most Presidents, and pretty much doing anything to get pass Mitt Romney’s statements that 47% of all Americans are basically lazy people that just rely on the State to give them support in one way or another. Of course, he forgets that amongst these lazy people are, for example, soldiers who have gone to war for America and lost limbs and are now on disability grants – but to him they are lazy people! The truth of the matter is if Americans could just vote on which party has the best policies, the Democrats would win by a million miles, because only the very rich would support the crazy policies that the Republicans have, which is that the rich should pay less tax and the sick and the elderly don’t need to be looked after by the State with comprehensive universal care. The Republicans say that I ssocialism and everybody should fend for themselves. It has never ceased to amaze me, and nor will it ever change, that so many people can end up voting for a multi-millionaire, representing the interests of the rich and who cannot possibly be for their benefit, just as long as they are told silly stories that Barack Obama is not born in America or to be frank, because a lot of people in America, however sad it is, simply don’t want to vote for a black man, even though he represents their interests far more than Mitt Romney. I follow the American elections closely, and write about it a lot, because it is still the most powerful country in the world and what they do and what they decide affects all of us ultimately.

Lance Armstrong really seems to have been exposed by the paperwork that came out recently with all of the confessions of basically every single member of his team saying that he was behind the doping ring. Lance Armstrong’s saving grace I think is the work he has done for the Cancer Foundation Livestrong, and obviously he has done the right thing by resigning, because the organisation would have no credibility if somebody, with the damaged reputation he has now, was to still head it.

I, like many people invested a lot of time in watching Lance win every single year, and I don’t think that any logical person, certainly anybody with a legal background, could possibly believe that he is innocent. One would prefer to, but there is simply no straws left to cling onto other than an argument advanced by my brother, that everybody in cycling was on drugs and Lance was still the best because they were all on an equal footing, all being on drugs, and Lance managed to beat them. From a lawyer’s point of view, you will always understand that there will always be one or two people with an axe to grind and you could often get two or three people who get together and agree to tell the same lie, but when the entire team is telling it, and the massage lady is admitting it, and basically everybody in the world has confessed it, plus there are signs that your blood results did indicate that there was something slightly amiss, and that on other occasions you had doctors write letters that excused substances that did come up in the test, and at a certain point one has to say that the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.

There is a reason Lance Armstrong never fought this case, he knew he could not possibly win and it is no surprise that Nike, who stood by Tiger even with all the allegations of multiple affairs, etc, terminated their relationship with Lance Armstrong saying that he basically fooled them when it came to drugs. He will go down as a notorious cheat, something that is hard for those of us who used to watch him then, to accept just as many of us still had fond feelings about Hansie Cronje. I think in fairness to Hansie, he took money for one or two games, of little consequence, and it now seems that Lance’s entire career was a lie and built around very clever strategies to avoid doping tests and stay in hotels in the countryside where no drug testers would ever go.
 

The biography of the Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe was recently launched. The biography is written by Ebrahim Harvey and although I doubt I will get round to reading it because I have a number of business books that will probably be more profitable for me to read, before I read more on politics, the extracts from it certainly make interesting reading. The books says that when President Mbeki was in charge that government Ministers always felt that they had to prepare very carefully before making presentations, because President Mbeki would always intervene and he would sometimes look as if he know more about what was going on in their portfolio than they did. Mbeki is quoted in the book as saying, about those times compared with the Cabinet under President Zuma, “But today I hear some Ministers saying that they miss the serious discussions and debates we had in Cabinet in the past.” That is certainly a bit of a swipe at Jacob Zuma and the current Cabinet.

This is not an article about evolution, but rather LTE, which if you bought the newspapers on a Sunday, would be what the vast majority of the adverts are about. The various cellular providers, and in particular Vodacom, announcing that they have launched LTE and that Vodacom in particular has operational sites around Johannesburg already. MTN apparently plans to launch it by the end of the year and no doubt Cell-C will also.

We are apparently one of the first countries in the world to start with LTE but no doubt we will all have to get new modems, and probably new phones, to use the technology because apart from the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy SIII, no other phones can use it. LTE will essentially allow us to search the Internet without the pages stalling, at speeds at least three times faster than 3G, if not even faster than that. It uses the spectrum currently being used by analog television signals and once South Africa moves to digital TV, there will be more spectrum that will be freed up and all those companies providing LTE capabilities will then be able to offer even more. The only drawback is that apparently the LTE modems are going to cost more than the modems and dongles we’ve all got used to using in our laptops but no doubt those prices will drop soon as well. Anything that improves the overall download speeds in South Africa can only be of benefit, while they are always telling us that we are amongst the first countries to have this, our broadband speeds are ridiculously slow compared to the rest of the world.

The semi-finals of the Champions League Twenty 20 take place this evening and on Friday, with the final on Sunday. We’ve had the pleasure of a number of international Twenty 20 teams in South Africa, with their high profile players and it is great to see that cricket is still popular. I say that, because I think it is one of those sports where they really have oversaturated the market, perhaps not in India and Pakistan, given the love of cricket on the sub-continent, but for me, and probably after watching the Proteas stumble so many times, I really do think there are simply too many tournaments and too many sub-species of the game.

I cannot see how 50 over matches continue to be popular, squeezed in between 20 over matches and 5 day tests, but for now, all seems well with cricket and what I consider to be oversaturation does not seem to be affecting them. I just wonder how long it will be before it does flow through to some of the events. You can already see it in rugby where, as a result of an expanded Tri-Nations, where we now have four nations, Currie Cup rugby matches are getting much smaller attendance figures than previously. I suppose on the other hand maybe it is already happening in cricket, but we accept it, because everybody knows that almost nobody goes to watch provincial cricket anymore but I wonder for how long Twenty 20 type teams that draw their players from various countries will find support.

I saw that the Democratic Alliance, in the name of Greg Krumbock, issued a press release about the Road Accident Fund’s deficit which did not get much coverage, but seems to have gone out on 11 October 2012. The DA wants to improve the speed of payments to injured persons by allowing them to submit all their claims electronically at hospitals, which seems to ignore the entire process of obtaining medico legal reports and investigating how the injuries affect somebody’s life differently and in different circumstances.

They want to introduce a “different management model for this Fund” which pretty much sounds like most of Mitt Romney’s plans for America – anything that Obama has done is incorrect, but he is not going to be mentioning what the plan is and likewise the DA is not advising what their actual plan is. The one thing that they have picked up on is that they say, “Output per staff member has gone down and the claims processing has slowed.” This is something that we (attorneys) have been saying for years, and much of the Road Accident Fund’s work is now “outsourced” by them to their own attorneys. Certainly, if they started using tenders and offers, particularly with suppliers’ claims, from the minute they are lodged with the RAF, they could reduce their costs considerably, but if the DA or anybody else wants to assist the Road Accident Fund I would imagine that the best way to do so is to tackle the problem of the suppliers’ claims, and to ensure that costs don’t get out of hand by making offers in matters sooner than they are now. In that regard I would bring in a specialised legal team, involving perhaps attorneys or even advocates on a contractual basis who have experience in this field of law and let them advise the Road Accident Fund on generous and quick tenders in matters so that legal costs do not have to be incurred, as they are now. The vast majority of the Road Accident Fund’s expenses could be reduced if only the Road Accident Fund got back to its job of actually settling cases.

It is summer and we have already been exposed to some very hot days, and sensible people will be using sunscreen. I found it tremendously worrying to read recently, following a report on CNN, that only 25% of 800 tested sunscreens are effective at protecting your skin without using potentially harmful ingredients. The Environmental Working Group released the 2012 sunscreen guide and basically what they say is you should use a sunscreen with a minimum SPF of 15 and a maximum of 50 and that you should make sure the labels list UVA and UVB. You should avoid products containing Oxybenzone and Retinyl Palminate. They say that those are potentially toxic chemicals, although the FDA has approved Oxybenzone. The information on the various sunscreens can be found at www.breakingnews.ewg.org/2012sunscreen/. They do of course remind everyone that the best sunscreen is a hat and a shirt because then there are no chemicals for the skin to absorb and no questions about whether the product works.

It is very reassuring, with all the fraud we are all exposed to now, that the banks try their very best to stay ahead of the curve all the time. Integrating your banking logins, together with your phone number and SMS’ing you is another way of protection to us as consumers of banking products. Nedbank, for example, when you are transacting on the Internet, will often send you a code, via SMS, which you have to put into the website before a transaction can go through.

I received the SMS in the picture alongside this article, the other day when I was not transacting on the Internet, and I immediately called Nedbank. I will get to the happy ending first and that is that somebody, in the UK, tried to put through a transaction of £1 035,00 on my credit card to buy computer parts and because I received this SMS and notified Nedbank, the transaction did not go through and they blocked my card and immediately issued a new one which was available for my collection less than 36 hours later. The only part of the story which is not complimentary to Nedbank is when I phoned the number, which you can see in the SMS, it did not have an option to speak to anybody and you have to choose between four different options – not one of them which has anything to do with reporting a fraudulent transaction on the Internet or on a credit card. I am lucky that I have a personal banker and was able to e-mail him, although of the three people that I e-mailed one wrote back, after another person had already confirmed that it was a fraudulent transaction and given me the details of it, some two days later to indicate that they could see nothing wrong!

So, it was a happy ending, but we really got left with one out of three people receiving an e-mail attending to the necessary and clearly knowing what was going on. I am going to forward this blog link to the people at Nedbank concerned and it will be interesting to see if any of them make any comment or have any input on the article.

I recently enjoyed watching this movie on DSTV’s BoxOffice section. It is Brazil’s highest earning movie ever and it is a political and action thriller exposing corruption within the police force and politicians. It is a fictional account but it is meant to be a fairly accurate portrayal of what goes down in the slums in Rio de Janeiro and obviously, with the World Cup and the Olympics coming up soon in Brazil, it is a topical and very interesting movie to watch. I certainly found it well worth the R25,00 that BoxOffice costs, and it really becomes quite hard to justify a long drive to the movies when you can see them at home not soon after, for half the price. Obviously, if the movie is in 3D and on an Imax screen, then one might want to watch it at the cinema.

The Public Protector has now come out with her report on Julius Malema and is linked to On Point Engineers. As some of the media have said, it is certainly not experience that won the tenders for On Point Engineering. Rival tenders got their bids eliminated because they put certain documents in the wrong envelope, but On Point took part in the tender without a valid tax number, claimed to have 9 years’ experience when it had just opened, and submitted the CV’s of people as alleged staff members who when contacted later, have no idea how their CV’s were obtained, other than to say they certainly never worked for the company!

Malema decided not to respond to the provisional report, which is one of his rights, and the Public Protector has traced another R2,1 million in dividends and loans that he received from the company, including towards his Sandton mansion. Having chosen not to respond, he is now alleging he has been found guilty in absentia. It will be interesting to hear how his attorneys, Brian Kahn Attorneys, tackle this particular case.

The illegal strikes are doing tremendous damage to South Africa at the moment and most of us will end up paying more for petrol and electricity in future because of the Rand weakness as a result. Ultimately though, the workers themselves will pay a price, because even if some of their ridiculous demands for increases are given, they are usually given on the basis that other staff members are retrenched or fired.

There will be more people out of work and it is slowly going to lead to the mechanisation of our mines. Much has been made of the fact that South African miners earn less than miners overseas, even though South African miners are in the top 20% of earners in South Africa. What people forget, and the experts have been saying this, is that the overseas mines are much more mechanised than they are here, and so you have a higher skilled type of worker whose job is to oversee machines. Ultimately, that is all that is going to happen in South Africa as well – the mines will get tired of these constant and never-ending strikes, they will dismiss the vast majority of their workers and slowly replace them with machines, as is done overseas.
The economy will be worse off and the mines ultimately will not have to put up with illegal strikes and inflated salary claims that any reasonable person must know they are not going to be given. The “all or nothing” approach of the miners will lead to nothing in the end, just as it did for the coalminers in England during the time of Margaret Thatcher, who went on a prolonged strike that basically saw the end of their industry. One hopes that reason prevails before another 10,000 or 15,000 jobs are lost.

A lot of people ignore the daily currency changes, and most of the time they don’t move much, but with the Rand currently diving, we are going to be looking at tremendous petrol hikes in the near future.
The Rand has fallen at least 10% against the Dollar in the last two weeks and while much of the petrol price does not actually reflect the cost of the product, the fact that the Rand is down 10% is going to lead to the price going up. A lot of the petrol and diesel prices are actually made up of government taxes and a portion is the levy to the Road Accident Fund, but a weakening Rand will add at least 20c or 30c a litre to next month’s increase, and at the moment there as no signs of stability in the Rand at all.

Moody’s, an international credit rating agency, recently downgraded five banks as well as 12 municipalities and Eskom and Telkom. In short, they are saying that lending money to the municipalities, which include Johannesburg, or the banks, comes at slightly more risk than previously they considered. An economist commented that the accounts and books of the various municipalities are in a total mess and a sign of a State that is not in a healthy situation.

Ultimately, it will make it more difficult for those municipalities as well as Telkom and Eskom to borrow money, which means that they will be lent money at high interest rates which ultimately means that we, the taxpayers, will be forced to pay more. The Rand weakened on the news immediately and Moody’s gave as one of the reasons, “the weakening of the South African government’s credit profile”.

A lot of people don’t realise when they launch an appeal against the criminal conviction and the sentence they get that they obviously risk a counter-appeal from the other side. The other side always has that right in the first place but normally bringing an appeal in the first place provokes it. Her appeal was dismissed and she is now in jail.

One has to wonder though why Sheryl Cwele, the former wife of our Intelligence Minister, appealed the 12 year sentence for drug dealing. I would have thought 12 years was a reasonably lenient sentence, and unfortunately for her the Supreme Court of Appeal thought so as well, and increased her sentence to 20 years. The Court held that as a qualified nurse she should know even more than most about the dangers involved in drugs and should not have become involved in drug dealing.

I have written about HD TV before, and basically said that I am surprised that anybody, after experiencing HD, can continue to watch normal channels. It is great news that they have added on new HD channels, but with DSTV having changed all the channel numbers, it is going to take some time to find them!

All the sports channels which were located at 171, 174, etc have moved on to 211 and so on, but the advantage is that you now have four channels showing sport in HD, which is really the only way to watch sport and a total of eight channels showing movies in HD, and that is apart from the Universal channel, the Studio channel and Discovery. It really makes sense, for those who have not made the change yet, to move on to an HD PVR at this time.

It is amazing how the power of reciprocation works. If somebody gives you something, you feel compelled to give them something back. Likewise, if somebody gives you a gift, you feel obliged to give them some of your time. In that regard, for example, an advertising firm recently dropped off a little coffee machine on my desk, asking for some of my time and to have a look at a website. Normally, I would not have any regard for most of these queries and just allow them to be dealt with by my advertising firm, but because I have been given something I really felt obliged to go along to the website, watch the two videos that were on the website and then refer it to my advertising company!

It does not mean that I will do business with the company, but because an effort was made which clearly not only cost time but money, I felt obliged to at least pay it some attention. It just reminds one of the principle that if you want something in life generally you have to give something and I don’t mean by that you have to give somebody a gift to get some of their time, but I do firmly believe that those who sit back from an egocentric point of view and think that everything will just flow to them, and they don’t need to do anything for other people, in order for things to happen for them, are naïve and destined for failure. You have to give of yourself, you have to give of your time and you have to give to others before you can worry about what you are going to get.

We get a lot of frustrated callers, who call in as a result of our advertising, and who want to know about doing a Road Accident Fund claim. There are many people who we cannot help, not because they don’t have a claim but because they don’t have a claim that we think they will ultimately be happy to do.

In other words, they may have a claim for R200,00 worth of past medical expenses which money will have to refunded to their medical aid or they may have a claim for an undertaking to cover their future treatment, something that I think is extremely valuable but that most people with a medical aid who will pick up the tab don’t seem to consider that important. If we turn away the case, the member of the public is very distressed saying that we are only interested in helping people with bigger claims, and on the other hand, if we take on the business, we know all to well how at the end of the matter, the clients will then complain saying that we put them through this long and arduous process, had them fill in tons of forms, sign documents, attend medico legal appointments (for hours at times) and to quote them, “All I am getting is a certificate of undertaking.”

At that time, no matter how much you explain how valuable the undertaking is, in terms of letting them get treatment, they are not interested. At the end of the day, we will be paid, and one simply does not feel comfortable getting paid when your client gets something that they don’t think is valuable. You also then become entangled with a client who does not recall that they were told that the claim would hardly be worth anything even though we send registered post letters to that effect to clients in such instances when they insist we take on the case, and who want to complain about it. The problem is that the law changed on 1 August 2008 and many people, while seeing great results and hearing about other people’s cases, do not understand that many of those results may relate to the law as it was previously or alternatively, they simply don’t judge very well the severity of somebody else’s injuries compared to theirs. Either way, we get a lot of people who are very unhappy because we cannot take them on as clients, and there is nothing we can do about it, because at the end of the day, if the law means that they no longer have a case which is worthwhile for them to do or perhaps no case at all, we cannot assist them.
 

Julius Malema has laughed off the criminal charges he faces, saying that they are political. There is no doubt that the timing is poor, and from that point of view it does give him ammunition to argue that it is a political decision.

However, these are charges that could and should have been brought a long time ago. After all, we have a man whose salary on the ANC Youth League was R20 000,00 a month and who we know bought a house for over R3 million, knocked it down and was busy building a R10 million house. You cannot do that on R20 000,00 a month because the bank alone is going to require proof, before bonding that amount, of a salary of approximately R300 000,00 a month. In short, we all know that there is something terribly wrong when it comes to his finances, so it is a tremendous pity that he was not singled out for attention in that regard a long time ago, and that it has taken until now for that action to be taken. I personally would be very surprised if he walks away being found innocent of all charges, and of course he still has huge tax bills from SARS to foot as well.

This past weekend saw the Ryder Cup taking place and America, having gotten into a commanding lead, managed somehow in the heat of battle to lose to Europe. The European players kept their cool, the Americans did not and strangely enough it was the more senior, more experienced American players that all crumbled in the heat of the moment.

By the time Tiger Woods had to sink a putt, to see whether or not the match could be halved, Europe had already retained the trophy, and that putt became meaningless. Experienced veterans like Jim Furyk as well as Steve Stricker made huge mistakes under pressure and the major PGA golf sites overseas said that they think, when it comes to these big pressurised moments, golf is much more of a young man’s game with the guys in their late twenties and early thirties having sunk their putts, and the guys in their forties having missed their putts. Golf certainly requires nerves of steel and perhaps sometimes, as in many fields, the naivety of youth and a lack of appreciation as to how great the pressure actually is, can help one in dealing with it – by simply not realising the full extent of it, something that you normally realise as you get older!

When road accidents result in the death of a husband, father and sole bread winner, de Broglio Inc Attorneys are there to fight for compensation for the spouses and children who are left behind.

On 3 March 2007, Jack Erasmus was fatally wounded in a motor vehicle accident when a vehicle travelling in the opposite direction to him traversed from one side of the highway into his correct lane of travel, colliding with him and resulting in injuries which took his life.

Jack left behind his wife Janet, son Gert, and daughter Elise. Jack had been the sole provider for his family, who were now left with no support.

De Broglio Inc Attorneys consulted with Janet and immediately set about in claiming for loss of support from the RAF for Janet and the two children who were now without a husband and father. Jack had been the sole bread winner for his family. He had owned a coffee shop and had had a second business at the time of the accident. Janet had not been working at the time of the accident.

Claiming for loss of support can be a complicated and intense process, especially when the victim is now deceased and cannot testify. De Broglio Inc Attorneys are specialists in Loss of Support claims against the Road Accident Fund and through thorough investigations and consultations with the relevant parties, they were able to settle the case for a substantial amount which would serve as compensation for Janet and the children.

Fortunately, Jack had kept sound financial records of his businesses and upon consultation with his auditor, de Broglio Inc attorneys were able to obtain detailed financial statements for both businesses. This evidence was critical in proving what Jack was earning in order to fully calculate a claim for his family for their support.

Since the accident, Jack’s wife and two children have relocated to Scotland to be closer to family. Jack’s wife is not working, and the one child is still in school.

In this case, the merits were settled 100% in the favour of de Broglio Inc Attorneys and Jack’s family, and the matter settled for an amount of R1 504 569.00.

*Names have been changed to protect client confidentiality 

Source: www.accidentclaim.co.za
 

I was quite excited to read that Telkom is planning a 40 mbps broadband service. I have spent time on a 100 mbps service before and to go to 40 from the current 10 mbps will make a substantial difference, especially for functions such as video conferencing. The average global broadband download speed at the moment is apparently 11.6 mbps according to mybroadband.co.za but in South Africa we are surfing the Internet at much slower speeds. Most of Sandton averages 4 mbps and one has to hope that South Africa speeds up, not only in terms of actual speed, but in terms of time, in moving to faster broadband speeds.