Tshwane Deals To Die For

Metro under the microscope for paying huge amounts for land in transactions that generate massive profits for speculators

- Susan Puren

THE MONTHS BEFORE THE 2016 LOCAL ELECTION WERE BUSY times for the City of Tshwane Metro Municipality. It acquired huge swathes of land that saw a few people smiling all the way to the bank. One lucky guy pocketed more than R94 million.

The property deals were all done back-to-back, meaning there were original owners as well as an intermediate owner or middleman who had only acquired the land for a few minutes on paper before transferring it at a much higher price to a third party; the City of Tshwane. The metro used taxpayers’ money to finance the sequence of deals right from the start.

The land that was purchased in one of the deals consisted of 20 portions of the farms Strydfontein 306 and 307 on the north-western outskirts of the capital, near the Rosslyn Hub industrial development. Deed searches show that Tshwane bought the 20 agriculture smallholdings, covering 226 hectares on 16 March 2016 for around R211m. The properties were transferred and registered into the metro’s name on various dates later that year.

Significantly, on registration, each of the 20 title deeds received consecutive deed numbers for Proco Management (Pty) Ltd (the owner and seller) and Tshwane (the buyer and new owner). This indicates that the registration into Tshwane’s name happened directly after the property was registered into Proco’s name. For example, portion 6 of Strydfontein 307 was registered to Proco with deed number T63281/2016 and to Tshwane with deed number T63282/2016 on 15 August 2016. Another example is portion 37 of Strydfontein 306, which was registered with deed number T56393/2016 to Proco and to Tshwane with deed number T56394/2016 on 21 July 2016. And so it went on: all 20 registrations followed the same pattern at the Deeds Office in Pretoria.