A foreign couple worth R49 million can finally retire in SA – despite home affairs and FNB

Source: Business Insider SA

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• In theory, South Africa welcomes foreigners worth at least R12 million who want to settle locally.
• A couple in their seventies from Singapore – worth R49 million – found it a little hard to take advantage of that welcome.
• First National Bank said, incorrectly, that they had submitted a fraudulent account statement.
• Even after that mistake was corrected, the department of home affairs refused to grant them residency, up to fight them in court.
• The DHA has now been ordered to issue their permits, and cover their legal costs.
• For more stories, go to www.BusinessInsider.co.za.

A wealthy couple from Singapore should finally receive permanent residency in South Africa towards the end of this month, after a three-and-a-half-year fight to take advantage of immigration provisions designed to attract wealthy people and their money.

And the department of home affairs (DHA) will have to settle their legal bill.

On Friday, the Western Cape High Court gave the director-general of home affairs and its minister 20 days to issue residence permits to Yew Teck Ling and See Hie Chua, a married couple of Singaporean nationals in their early 70s.

They have a net worth of at least R49 million, well above the threshold of R12 million used in South Africa to determine if people are rich enough for special treatment.

But that made no difference when things went horribly wrong after they submitted their application for permanent residency in January 2019.

The couple submitted nine statements from three different banks, to show how much cash they had. As would emerge later, the DHA took almost exactly two years to ask one of those banks, First National Bank, to verify some of those statements. FNB’s specialist bank statement verification unit immediately came back with an answer: at least one statement “appears to be fraudulent as the transactions reflected thereon does [sic] not correspond with the transactions on the Bank’s systems.”

It took another eight months, to September 2021, for DHA to convey that news to the couple, telling them that their attempt at fraud makes them people “not of good and sound character”, and so not welcome in South Africa. 

See also | Home affairs has dropped central adjudication of visas, after months of complaints

DHA did not tell them which bank statement had been deemed a fake, not when they asked in October, not when they asked in November, and not when they asked in December.

Only this year, in the face of legal action, did their lawyers first obtain the record of the decision, and then an admission that crying fraud had been “an error”.

Armed with that, their lawyers went back to home affairs in May, to suggest that it stop fighting their court application for their permits.

DHA refused. The couple, it said, had now overstayed their previous permits. They would first have to fill out the correct forms to explain why they had not renewed their temporary visas. Having so sought to legalize their stay, they could either apply for permanent residency again from scratch or could try for an appeal against the previous decision, having first asked for condonation for filing that appeal late.

Either way, they would not get “the opportunity to submit the correct and verified bank statements with proof thereof.”

This, the DHA’s lawyers told their lawyers, would be a “practical and pragmatic solution going forward.”

In fact, there was absolutely no other way to deal with the case, home affairs director general Livhuwani Makhode told the court. His decision to deny the application had been correct, he said; the fact that he had done so based on a mistake by someone else made his call neither wrong nor unreasonable.

And now, Makhode said, it was utterly impossible to reconsider the matter. As the file on the application had been closed, any further action on it – such as correcting FNB’s mistake – would undermine departmental procedure from which there can be no deviation.

He did not say how exactly the couple could reapply in the face of an uncorrected finding that they had committed fraud, nor how long their new application might take.

But considering South Africa’s approach to attracting rich foreigners – at least in theory – there is no reason to put the couple through the uncertainty of another application, ruled judge Judith Cloete. Instead, DHA should simply issue their permits.

And, so as to not “make a mockery of their duty to be accountable”, the home affairs DG and minister can pay their legal costs too, in their official capacities.