[miningmx.com] – SOUTH African attorney, Hulme Scholes, has brought an application in the High Court in Pretoria aimed at declaring the mining charter unconstitutional and void, said BDLive citing documents in its possession.
The application also combines a court action brought by the Chamber of Mines regarding elements of the mining charter – a development that will hinder the South African government’s Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) from settling with the chamber out of court, said BDLive. Scholes is a partner in MalanScholes.
South African law allows two cases dealing with overlapping or similar matters to be consolidated into a single case, said BDLive.
In his application, Scholes argued that a judgment in his case would mean that the declaratory order sought by the chamber over the charter’s empowerment ownership obligations on mining companies would “become irrelevant”.
The Chamber of Mines brought an action regarding the mining charter questioning the government’s interpretation of ‘once-empowered, always-empowered’ but did not bring the mining charter into question in its entirety.
The chamber would “almost certainly” refuse to have its application consolidated with Scholes’s, said Peter Leon, a partner and mining lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills.
“The chamber wouldn’t want their application to be contaminated by the Scholes application, which is a full-on attack on the charter, whereas theirs is much more nuanced,” he told BDLive.
The chamber’s March 15 court hearing would probably be delayed by Scholes’s application.
