Johannesburg - They are a new breed of building hijackers who are moving into the more affluent suburbs of Gauteng and they do their dirty work with the help of assault rifles and lawyers.
These highly organised syndicates are operating because they have learnt to exploit the legal system so as to keep their tenants in hijacked properties for as long as they can while raking in millions of rand.
For the legal owners it takes months or even years to evict the tenants at a cost of sometimes hundreds of thousands of rand. Then there is the fear that the hijackers will return.
“What we have experienced is that building hijackers don’t just give up after they have been evicted. They do attempt further incursions. So my clients are incurring expenses in that they have to keep armed security personnel on the premises for a few months after the fact,” said Dominic Steyn, head of corporate, commercial, tax and litigation at Cowan-Harper-Madikizela Attorneys.
Steyn’s clients, who are victims of building hijackings, are reluctant to talk to the media about their experiences. They fear victimisation and they also fear what the building hijackers will do to their tenants. However, Steyn described to the “Saturday Star” how one recent building hijacking happened in Pretoria East.
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