sold, was instituted at some point before August 2024 .
On 23 August 2024, while that action was pending,
the parties, according to the defendants in their affidavit
resisting summary judgment , came to an agreement to
suspend the litigation for six months, during which the
defendants would make payment of R60 000 per month to
Wesbank , and whereafter the action could be settled on
further terms to be agreed.
On the defendants' version, five out of six of those
R60 000 payments were made . Wesbank does not accept
that, but does not appear to have put up a version disputing
it . The first action was nevertheless left fallow for several
months . However, acting on its rights under the agreement,
Wesbank instituted this second action on 10 June 2025, in
which it again allege s breach of the main agreement and
claim s repossession of the vehicle .
The defendants gave notice of their intention to
defend the action and filed a plea . At paragraph 5 of that
plea, the defendants say that a compromise was entered
into between Wesbank , represented by its attorney, and the
defendants . The compromise is said to be more or less on
the terms of the payment arrangement reached on 23
August 202 4 in relation to the first action .
Although the plea does not make clear what the terms
of the compromise were, Ms Ro estorf , who appeared for the
defendants, directed me to the affidavit resisting summary
judgment , where it is very clearly set out that the 23 August
2024 compromise was in fact the agreement to suspend
litigation in the first action, provided that certain payments
were made to Wesbank .
In the second action, in addition to relying on what
the defendants call the compromise, the defendants also
raise the fact that the first action had not been withdrawn
when the second one was instituted . That defect was cured
when a notice of withdrawal of the first action was filed on
14 April 2026.
Accordingly, I am left with a cause of action made out
in the second action, which is met with a compromise
alleged to have been reached in relation to the first action .
That might not have been particularly problematic for the
defendants if the compromise reached in relation to the first
action would in fact have been a defence to it . But on the
terms spelt out in the affidavit resisting summary judgment ,
the compromise alleged by the defendants plainly was not a
defence either to the first or the second action . At best, it
was an agreement to suspend the first action for six
months, provided that certain payments were made .
Accordingly, the compromise as alleged in the plea
does not raise an issue for trial . If the matter went to trial,
it would not be an answer to Wesbank’s claim that a
previous action now withdrawn was suspended for six
months on certain conditions . I did not understand Ms
Ro estorf , who appeared for the defendants, to make any
submissions to the contrary.
For all of those reasons, in my view, summary
judgment for the repossession of the vehicle must be
granted. On the question of costs, Mr Boshomane , who
appeared for Wesbank , pointed out that the finance
agreement provides for costs of suit on an attorney and
client scale . Ms Ro estorf invited me to deprive Wesbank of
its costs because a number of documents extraneous to the
proper consideration of a summary judgment application
had been filed without my leave .
While I might appropriately take a dim view of that,
the fact of the matter is that I have had no regard at all to
any of the improperly filed documents . The only document s
to which I have had regard are the notice of withdrawal of
the first action, the defendant's plea and the affidavit
resisting summary judgment , together, of course, with the
application for summary judgment itself and the particulars
of claim in the second action .
In those circumstances, though the unauthorised
filing of papers ought properly to be deprecated, I cannot
see that Wesbank’s conduct in this case rises to the level of
delinquency necessary to deprive it of its costs . In