A man has won 50 percent of his claim after appealing an RAF judgment not to be compensated after his accident.
|||Despite being found partly responsible for an accident which left him wheelchair-bound, a KwaZulu-Natal man has won his case for damages from the Road Accident Fund eight years after the crash.
Jacob Lazarus was left paralysed after his car crashed into a tree in March 2004.
Lazarus only claimed from the fund two years after the accident, initially believing that he could not claim.
When the fund refused to compensate him, the matter went to trial and a judge found that the fund was not liable for his damages and dismissed the case.
However, Lazarus took the matter on appeal and Pietermaritzburg High Court Judge Kevin Swain ruled recently that the Road Accident Fund should pay 50 percent of his claim plus costs. The amount of the claim has yet to be decided.
Lazarus said in court papers that he crashed his car after swerving to avoid an unidentified vehicle that swerved into his path.
There were no independent witnesses to the accident and the other vehicle’s driver was never found.
The fund’s attorneys argued that the delay in filing the claim and Lazarus’s failure to trace the other driver suggested that there had been no other vehicle involved in the crash.
However, Judge Swain found that Lazarus’s version of the accident was not “so improbable” as to be rejected as false.
He found that Lazarus had been 50 percent to blame for the accident as he had been travelling at a speed in excess of the 60km/h speed limit.
“The appellant must have been travelling at a speed well in excess of his estimation of 55 to 60km/h in order to travel across the opposite lane and the grass verge and collide with the tree with such disastrous consequences. If he had been travelling at his estimated speed, in my view he would have been able to retain control of his vehicle without colliding with the tree,” the judge said. - The Mercury