SA Migration International

News Articles

Home Affairs has 30 days to process permits for 182 immigrants with R15bn to invest

Source: Moneyweb, 10/11/2022

Some would-be immigrants have been waiting for seven years for permanent residence permits.

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and its minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, were given 30 days by the Pretoria High Court on Monday to process permanent residence applications for 182 would-be immigrants, some of whom have been waiting seven years for permanent residence.
Papers before the court say the delays are holding up inward investment of at least R15 billion, much of it for business or property investment.
The applicants asked the court to compel the DHA and Motsoaledi to either grant or refuse them permanent residence status, arguing the delays in processing the permits were irrational, unlawful and unconstitutional.
The other respondents cited in the case were President Cyril Ramaphosa and VFS Global South Africa, which processes permanent residence permits on behalf of Home Affairs.
The immigrants comprise Swiss, German, British and US investors “who have been denied administrative justice in their permanent residence applications, which has prevented them from completing investments estimated to be over R15 billion,” said Advocate Simba Chitando, who is representing the applicants.
The applicants argued in their court papers that they met the requirements for permanent residence, hence there was no valid or lawful reason for the delays. Though the applicants asked the court for a 10-day turnaround in either accepting or rejecting their applications, the court granted DHA 30 days.
The judgment is a stunning rebuke for DHA and Motsoaledi, says Chitando.
Continued delays
The matter was originally set down for hearing on 10 December 2021, but the DHA asked for more time to consider the applications. The case was again set down for hearing on 24 June 2022, but was removed from the roll when it appeared DHA was not able to respond in time. For this it was forced to tender legal costs.
The case was finally heard on 7 November 2022, though Chitando says DHA has still not filed any response, despite a year of litigation and several postponements.
“This is an embarrassment for the entire government, and every self-respecting South African citizen,” he says. “Left with no reasons for the failure to make a decision, the investors briefed our legal team to approach the Pretoria High Court in May 2021 to compel the government to do its job.”
In papers before the court, Global Migration Services, one of the applicants in the case, explained the delays in processing applications commenced in 2010 when then-Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma centralised permanent residence applications in the Pretoria national office, and that prolonged the process from six months to three years.
In 2015, VFS Global was brought on board and �` though it did not make decisions as to who got permanent residence �` the application process prolonged from three to six years.
This is far longer than DHA’s indicated processing time of eight to 10 months.
Papers before the court say applicants were further delayed by Covid-related disruptions to service. The only valid explanation for the delays is that the DHA has almost totally broken down, and is incapable or refusing to process the applications before them.
Further, the papers say these inordinate delays effectively nullified Section 25 of the Immigration Act which sets out the process for granting permanent residence, while blocking billions of rands of inward investment and the resultant job creation this would bring.
Virtually all of the applicants are wealthy individuals and their families who plan to set up businesses in SA, purchase properties and create thousands of jobs, says Chitando.
Quite apart from the delays, the immigrants have spent considerable sums on unnecessary legal costs, while the South African taxpayer has had to foot the bill for the DHA’s fruitless legal costs, says Chitando

Search

Latest News

As a South African who has adopted a nomadic work lifestyle alongside my wife, Ingrid Lotze, I’ve been an interested observer of South Africa’s snail-pace digital nomad visa (DNV) development process. Despite the optimism surrounding its introduction, the visa seems to miss several crucial marks for digital nomads like us.... Read more...

EREMY MAGGS: I want to stay with crime now. Individuals with a criminal record may be faced with significant challenges when seeking employment, I think that’s a given. Here in South Africa, employers may legally exclude an applicant from consideration for a position if having a clean criminal record is what is termed an inherent requirement of the job. That phrase, inherent requirement, is important, but what exactly does that mean, and when can an applicant be lawfully excluded for having a criminal record?... Read more...

There are fears that more people will be separated by the introduction of a minimum salary level for those wanting UK family visas. Families living in the UK and abroad have raised concerns about what new rules will mean for them as they try to reunite with foreign spouses. In December, the Home Office, which says migration to the UK is too high, announced a package of measures to reduce net migration, following a spike in arrival numbers.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail.Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail. Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

North Korean hackers have been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus to plant backdoors on big corporate networks and deliver cryptocurrency miners through GuptiMiner malware. Researchers describe GuptiMiner as `a highly sophisticated threat` that can perform DNS requests to the attacker`s DNS servers, extract payloads from images, sign its payloads, and perform DLL sideloading. Delivering GuptiMiner via eScan updates In a report released today, cybersecurity company Avast says that the threat actor behind GuptiMiner had an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) position to hijack the normal virus definition update package and replace it with a malicious one named ‘updll62.dlz.’... Read more...

Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) this week revealed that Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) has achieved a ground-breaking milestone by processing more than 10 million passengers over a single financial year. This is the highest number of regional and international passengers processed since COVID-19... Read more...

DA MP says hours lost continue to result in persons being unable to collect their ID documents due to unmanageable queues The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents. Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications.... Read more...

Home Affairs’ seemingly endless court battles set the department back more than R110-million between April 2023 and the end of February this year. This was revealed in a written parliamentary response by minister Aaron Motsoaledi. He said the department accumulated a litigation bill of R117 692 996.3, higher than the R72 637 944.51 spent the year before.... Read more...

Due to system downtime and load-shedding, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) lost nearly 141,000 hours of Smart ID application and production time between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 financial years. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed this figure in a recent response to questions raised in Parliament by Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos. Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of smart ID production and application hours lost to technical difficulties and load-shedding per province for each financial year from 2019/2020. These disruptions hit home Affairs offices in the Eastern Cape the hardest, with over 34,000 hours to rotational power cuts and system downtime. Mpumalanga offices lost the next-highest number of hours at 17... Read more...