Owners of Mams Mall fail in court bid to ensure no billboard obscures shopping centre
|Published
The entrance to Mams Mall in Mamelodi. Picture: Oupa Mokoena/African News Agency (ANA)
Pretoria - The owners of Mams Mall in Mamelodi have failed in their Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, bid to ensure no billboard obscures the view of the shopping centre.
NAD Property Income Fund and Resilient Properties, co-owners of the land on which the mall is built, last year successfully interdicted a Doornpoort businessman from erecting a huge billboard in front of the mall. Cedric Pato had received permission from the City of Tshwane to erect it.
The mall owners argued that the City should never have given Pato the go-ahead as he did not adhere to all the requirements, and neither Pato nor the City had consulted them or the public about it.
The billboard if erected, would obstruct the view to their mall, they argued. They also complained that owners of property in the vicinity where the billboard was to be set up (including themselves) were not consulted by the City.
Judge Norman Davis subsequently interdicted Pato in June 2019 from erecting the billboard. But the landowners wanted to ensure that no one would in future be able to erect a huge billboard in the area and thus asked the court to review and set aside the permission given to him by the City.
The court interdicted Pato from erecting a billboard, but it was still open to the City to grant anyone else this permission, they said. Also, as long as the City could approve a billboard without prior consultation, the decision was binding and had legal effect until it was set aside by a court.
But Judge V Ngalwana said there was no indication anyone else wanted to erect a billboard there. The application hinged on another party – not bound by the 2019 interdict – in future wanting to erect a billboard. In turning down the review application, he concluded that if the erection of a billboard did come to pass in future, the applicants could turn to court again. “… for a court to intervene between warring parties, there must be live controversy… It is moot.”
Pretoria News