Pretoria High Court declares tech firm and director ‘vexatious litigants’ after 20-year battle with Standard Bank

The Gauteng High Court in Pretoria has drawn a firm line under two decades of litigation between The Standard Bank of South Africa and technology company Advertising Digital Services (ADS).

It declared ADS and its director, Johan Hendrik Reynders, vexatious litigants (a person who persistently files lawsuits without a valid legal basis, primarily to harass, annoy, or cause delay to another person).

Judge Millar found that ADS and Reynders had “persistently sought to undermine court orders, rules of court and directives” despite adverse rulings from the High Court, Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) and Constitutional Court.

The saga began in 2003, when ADS claimed the bank had stolen its “@ key-system” – a virtual scrambled keypad for online banking security – after the parties met under a non-disclosure agreement.

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The bank had already developed its own scrambled pin-pad system, which the court later found was based on technology long in the public domain.

ADS first sued the bank in 2004, alleging breach of confidentiality.

That case was dismissed with costs in 2010, with the court finding no breach of the NDA and no misappropriation of intellectual property.

ADS, represented at times by as many as six different law firms and at other times by Reynders himself, repeatedly sought to appeal the decision.

Each attempt, including those lodged with the SCA and Constitutional Court, failed.

Undeterred, ADS launched fresh proceedings in 2017, reframing its allegations as fraud and misrepresentation.

This case was also dismissed, with High Court in that matter calling the company’s conduct “an abuse of process that wasted judicial resources”.

Judge Millar noted that ADS had “litigated the self-same issue over a period of 22 years” and refused to accept the finality of previous rulings.

“It is improper, abusive and vexatious to refuse to accept the decisions of the court,” he said.

The judge went a step further: “Taking every point that can be taken in litigation and exhausting every appeal and when that has yielded no fruit, instituting the same proceedings against the same litigants, although clothed differently with a purported new cause of action, is by all accounts improper and abusive.”

Invoking the Vexatious Proceedings Act, Millar granted an order prohibiting ADS and Reynders from instituting any new legal proceedings against Standard Bank, its employees or representatives in any court without prior leave from a judge.

The restriction is to operate indefinitely and will be published in the Government Gazette.

The pair were also ordered to pay punitive costs on the attorney-and-own-client scale.

“The inability and failure on the part of ADS and Mr Reynders to accept the finality of adverse findings... is the direct cause of the course of conduct that they have embarked upon,” Millar said, adding that neither the bank nor the courts should be subjected to further “recycling of this matter”.

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