Ask any ouk who has had to do military service of the meaning of the word “omkeer” – about turn.

Sometime in June we received Registrar’s Circular 7 of 2010 which placed an outright ban to the restoration of deeds [other than in two exceptional cases].

Restoration is the process whereby a deed that has been rejected by the Deeds office, is “restored” without having to go through the whole process of re-lodgment, etc. This was particularly useful where the rejection error was one that was easily corrected or where, as sometimes happened, the deeds office erroneously rejected a deed which it should not have done.

Now, it only seems fair that if a deed has been rejected because a deeds office examiner made an error, that the deeds office says “Oops, sorry, we slipped up and we will make amends by restoring the deed”.

No, said the Registrar, even in that case, no more restorations.

I subsequently learnt that this circular was the reaction by the Registrars (of Deeds) to the fraud that had taken place when several Johannesburg Municipality properties had been fraudulently transferred. So, because of the misdeeds of some deeds office officials, all of us are now “punished”.

But, I am happy to report, the Registrar of Deeds at Pietermaritzburg has withdrawn Circular 7 of 2010, i.e. she has done an “omkeer”.

I hear through the grapevine via my esteemed Pietermaritzburg colleague, that the deeds office was “threatened” with High Court Action, hence the omkeer.


Regards,
Sieg


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[I am now blogging this diary: see http://aconveyancersdiary.blogspot.com/ ]