Neighbourly fists fly over renovation
A suburban spat between a Cape Town businessman and his aggrieved neighbour over unauthorised renovations has erupted into violence and charges of assault.
Eddie Redelinghuys, 61, who manages a large organic compost company, and neighbour Graham Bath, 68, this week faced assault charges following a skirmish at the Tristan Lodge apartment building in Mouille Point.
Redelinghuys and his wife own apartments on the first and eighth floors, and Bath lives in a unit on the third floor, overlooking the bustling Atlantic seaboard.
Cordial relations between the two men turned sour earlier this year when Redelinghuys started renovations on his first-floor apartment, which is owned by a company called Clusten 74 Pty Ltd, registered in the name of his wife, Debbie. The couple are trustees of the Tristan Lodge body corporate, of which he is chair.
Last month Bath approached the Cape Town high court for an urgent interdict to prevent the Redelinghuys building project which to date has no approval from the City of Cape Town from going ahead. In his founding affidavit, Bath claims the building plans were twice turned down by the Tristan Lodge body corporate, in November last year and again in January this year.
He said Debbie Redelinghuys’s company, Clusten, ignored a letter of demand sent earlier this year. Clusten applied for building approval in August but a decision is still pending.
“What Clusten is doing by undertaking construction without approved plans and without body corporate [approval] is criminal. This case is therefore inherently urgent,” Bath says in his affidavit.
The disagreement over the building paled into insignificance compared with the subsequent fallout and physical violence.
Bath blocked the entrance to prevent building contractors from leaving the site after they had obstructed his parking bay for hours.
Redelinghuys had Bath removed by the police.
Bath then tried to get the police to stop builders blocking his vehicle’s access to and from the building, saying their scaffolding and trucks had for months routinely obstructed entrance to his parking bay.
The dispute culminated in a brawl, prompted by Bath filming the building operations, in full view of neighbours. Video footage shows a surly Redelinghuys approaching Bath and pushing the phone. The ensuing fight was apparently captured on CCTV footage.
“He had me on the ground with an arm on my throat,” Bath told the Sunday Times this week, adding that he had fought back. Redelinghuys has declined to comment.
Both men laid charges of assault and were seen at the Cape Town magistrate’s court on Wednesday. It is unclear if the cases will go ahead.
Western Cape police this week confirmed that an assault charge had been registered at the Sea Point police station for further investigation.
“According to reports, the victim, who is a 68-year-old man, went to an address in Beach Road, Mouille Point, on Friday September 30 2022,” said police spokesperson Ndakhe Gwala. “He met with a 61-yearold man who [allegedly] assaulted him.”
Redelinghuys managed the City of Cape Town’s green waste disposal via his company Reliance Compost for several years. The “Compost King” took legal action against the city in 2019 in relation to the tender process.
Redelinghuys was also caught up in a bitter legal spat with California-based US biotech firm IFG in 2014 when a court there ruled that he had illegally imported one of its new table grape varieties, “Sugar Crisp”, to grow at his farm in Paarl.
In 2019 the Western Cape High Court ordered Redelinghuys via two shelf company “respondents” under his control to comply with the US court ruling and destroy all IFG vines in his possession. Bath is also a successful businessman and former member of the Mouille Point Ratepayers Association. In 1997 he developed the MySchool programme to raise funds for South African schools, which he sold to Woolworths.
City spokesperson Priya Reddy said the city was aware that alterations had started at the Redelinghuys unit. “The area building inspector has issued a cease works notice,” Reddy said, adding that the building application was still being assessed.
Debbie Redelinghuys referred queries to her husband, who declined to comment other than to say he doesn’t “wash laundry in public”.
Though the couple declined to give their version of events, documents before the high court reveal the dispute centres on a portion of common property the couple are incorporating into their first-floor apartment. They say they have a historic right to enclose the property through a body corporate decision in 2014. Bath disputes this and says the right applied to a previous owner, not to Redelinghuys and his wife.
In his high court application, Bath sought an urgent stop-works order and a demolition order to remove the work done to date. But in a ruling handed down this week, judge Babalwa Mantame dismissed Bath’s contention that the matter was urgent and said he should first have approached the Community Schemes Ombud Service.
“It would not assist the owners to always approach the court in matters that could easily be resolved by an ombud,” the judge said.