He is being sued by Mr Sharpe, his company and the
company’s chief operations officer Ms Tatiana Aleshina.
Mr Biti has on four occasions, through his legal counsel,
caused the postponement of the civil trial giving various excuses and the High
Court now reckons that he needs to pay the extra expenses or compensate the
extra losses incurred by the other party for three of those hearings.
The never ending delays to have the trial commence provoked
Mr Sharpe to seek the court’s intervention, arguing that the postponements have
financially prejudiced him and the company.
Through his legal counsel, Advocate Thembinkosi Magwaliba,
Mr Sharpe applied for costs against Mr Biti after his application in the
Supreme Court had not only been struck off, but was also found to be
incompetent at law, among other abortive hearings of the civil trial between
January 10 and July 4 this year.
Mr Biti, represented by Professor Lovemore Madhuku,
doggedly opposed the application for wasted costs asking the High Court to
reserve costs until the final determination of the case.
Wasted costs are litigation costs which must be paid
personally by a lawyer where a judge considers that lawyer has caused another
party or the lawyer’s own client to suffer unnecessary extra costs.
The costs amount to a penalty imposed by the court to mark
its disapproval of the unreasonable or negligent way that lawyer would have
conducted a case and so caused at least one of the parties to incur serious
additional costs or losses.
Justice Tawanda Chitapi presiding over the matter allowed
the application by Mr Sharpe over three of the four abortive hearings between
January and July this year, finding merit in the application.
Mr Biti now has to pay the costs incurred by Mr Sharpe for
the abortive hearings on 10 January, 6 March and 29 May, said Justice Chitapi.
But these extra costs for the abortive hearing on 4 July were reserved, meaning
it will be decided later if they were wasted.
In June this year, the Supreme Court dismissed Mr Biti’s
application for leave to appeal against a High court decision that Mr Sharpe
could proceed to sue him.
The application was struck off the roll, with costs. In
granting Mr Sharpe the order for wasted costs, Justice Chitapi noted that Mr
Biti’s application was no longer before the Supreme Court since it had been
struck off the roll.
He said Mr Sharpe and his co-applicants were all along made
to wait for the Supreme Court decision but there was no outcome of substance.
Mr Sharpe and his co-applicants were put out of pocket by
attending court only for the matter failing to proceed because of what turned
out to be an invalid process.
“In effect, the invalidity of the process which was struck
off the roll means that the court was being sold a dummy in that there was no
legally valid process before the Supreme Court,” said the judge.
Augur and Mr Sharpe launched the defamation lawsuit against
Mr Biti three years ago after the politician, in his twitter handle, named him
as the most corrupt person looting Zimbabwe’s resources.
However, Mr Biti objected to the defamation lawsuit but
lost the case at High Court by way of a default judgment entered against him.
Mr Biti then approached the Supreme Court seeking leave to
appeal against the decision by the High Court to dismiss an attempt to reject
the defamation summons. But the Supreme Court struck the appeal application off
the roll with costs on the basis that the motion was improper before the court.
The judge noted that the order of the High Court, which Mr
Biti sought to challenge, was a default judgment hence the politician had to
purge his default in the High Court first, and so had jumped the gun by
approaching the Supreme Court.
The application was also filed after the lapse of the
mandatory 10-day period stipulated in the Supreme Court rules within which he
had to approach the court after the High Court refused leave to appeal.
Augur Investments is seeking US$500 000 damages from Mr
Biti, with Mr Sharpe another US$400 000, and chief operations officer Tatiana
Aleshina another US$100 000.
Mr Sharpe also cited the opposition party for pursuing a
malicious agenda based on Mr Biti’s tweets.
Sometime in December 2020, Mr Biti is alleged to have
further published two other defamatory statements concerning Mr Sharpe and Ms
Aleshina and several other prominent business people that he named as amongst a
coterie of elite looters that were allegedly bleeding Zimbabwe. Herald
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