Top court issues costs order against Levitt

Rael Levitt, former CEO of Auction Alliance (AA), has lost his battle to prevent the Hawks from investigating allegations of fraud, corruption and money laundering against himself and the company he founded, according to a Financial Mail report. In what it describes as a ‘withering judgment’ handed down recently, the court dismissed the case on the grounds that it bore no prospect of success. But in a highly unusual move, the eight-person Bench also ordered that Levitt and AA bear the legal costs of the police. ‘Ordinarily this court would not order costs against an unsuccessful litigant in proceedings against the state,’ the 10-line judgment read. However, ‘an order of costs may be granted where the conduct of the litigant has been vexatious, frivolous, professionally unbecoming or in any other similar way abusive of the court’. In the case of Levitt, his conduct was deemed frivolous. The report says the ruling paves the way for the Hawks to access evidence that is sitting in more than 100 bags and scores of boxes seized in August 2012. The evidence was obtained in a raid of AA’s headquarters in Cape Town. It was the legality of the search warrants used for those raids that Levitt chose to challenge and which has prevented the police from viewing the seized material until now, after three years of legal wrangling.