THE LOVE THAT BEAT THE LAW
Millionaire’s domestic worker lover heads to ConCourt
It was by all accounts a match made in heaven, friends of Anthony Ruch said this week of the late millionaire’s relationship with former domestic worker Jane Bwanya.
What started as a chance meeting at a taxi stop in Cape Town’s plush Camps Bay suburb in 2014 this week ended up in the Constitutional Court, where Bwanya is hoping the law will change to allow heterosexual partners to inherit if they were cohabiting, in situations where there is no valid will.
Bwanya has already received a final settlement of R3m from Ruch’s estate following a deal with his executors, and is therefore not eligible to claim his remaining financial assets . These include cash from the sale of his R6.7m Camps Bay house and R2.5m Mouille Point flat and R1m in financial investments. Instead they will go to distant relatives living overseas. However, Bwanya, 38, is pursuing the case in a bid to have the law changed.
On Tuesday she approached the Constitutional Court to have an order by the Western Cape High Court in September 2020 confirmed. That court held that a section of the Intestate Succession Act is invalid and unconstitutional because it does not allow for surviving life partners in a permanent opposite-sex life partnership to inherit from their late partners’ estates.
In her judgment, Western Cape High Court judge Penelope Magona said the act had to be amended to include, alongside the word “spouse”, the words, “or a partner in a permanent opposite-sex life partnership in which the partners had undertaken reciprocal duties of support and had been committed to marrying each other”.
The Constitutional Court in 2016 ruled that same-sex partners could inherit their deceased partner’s intestate estate even if they were not legally married, but this did not extend to heterosexual couples.
The couple, who were said in court papers to have been planning to start a family and open a cleaning business together, came from opposite poles of society.
Ruch, who died aged 57, ran an upmarket BnB on Camps Bay’s Rottingdean Road, having made his extensive wealth from property sales and rentals, financial investments, and trading in gold and on the JSE.
Bwanya was employed as a domestic worker in Camps Bay, supporting her family in Zimbabwe by sending groceries, money and supplies back home when she could.
According to papers filed in the Western Cape High Court, the couple met at a Camps Bay taxi rank in February 2014 as Bwanya struggled to load bags into a minibus taxi.
Within days of their meeting, court papers say, Bwanya was “swept off her feet” by Ruch, who four months later told her he loved her and asked her to live with him.
Bwanya, who had all her financial needs taken care of by Ruch, kept her job as a domestic worker, with the businessman’s chauffeur dropping her off at her employer when she needed to report for duty.
But, two years later, on April 23 2016 — two months before the couple were to travel to Zimbabwe for Ruch to pay lobola to her family — Bwanya’s world came crashing down when Ruch died of a heart attack.
Bwanya’s lawyer, Martin Bey, said his client would not be giving interviews.
Ruch’s friend, Joe Galante, told the Sunday Times: “Tony was head over heels in love with Jane. He worshipped her. For the last six months of his life, whenever we met for coffee, all he could talk about was their marriage. “Tony was not your conventional type of person. He was extravagant, but at the same time very kind. He cared for people. He had a big heart. “Tony’s death was a massive blow to Jane. She was devastated.”
But when it came to winding up his estate, estimated to be worth more than R10m, Ruch’s executors discovered that Bwanya had been left out of the will. Ruch had never updated his will, which left his entire estate to his mother, Lorna Ruch, who died in 2013.
Bwanya wanted to claim from the estate as a surviving spouse. The executor rejected her claim, although before the challenge was heard in court, Bwanya reached a full and final settlement of R3m with the executors.
In the high court judgment, Magona said Bwanya had through witnesses, including Ruch’s close friends Harold Nakan and Galante, shown they had had an “affectionate relationship”.
“Nakan stated that the couple often hugged and kissed each other in his presence. Galante stated that the deceased treated her like a princess. Ruch treated Bwanya’s brother, Givemore, like a brother-in-law.
“In an entry [in Ruch’s diary] dated 15 October 2015, the deceased [wrote] about cementing the relationship with a baby.”
Nakan told the Sunday Times Ruch and Bwanya were “made for each other”.
“You could see how much they loved each other. He was going to marry her. Every time we saw each other he would describe in detail the wedding plans. If he had not died he would definitely have married her.”
Nakan, who described Ruch as meticulous keeper of records, especially of important documents to do with his property, trading and other business transactions, said it was strange that his will was not up to date.
Advocate Robert Stelzner argued in the high court that benefits were not extended to survivors of heterosexual life partnerships, though they are available for survivors of same-sex life partnerships.
Tony was head over heels in love with Jane. He worshipped her Joe Galante