Crawdaddy's restaurant wins damages from City of Tshwane over sinkhole incident

THE City of Tshwane is liable to pay damages to Crawdaddy's restaurant in Centurion after the food outlet suffered a loss in profit due to a massive sinkhole in front of its premises.

- ZELDA VENTER

This comes after the city faced several lawsuits - including that of Crawdaddy's - following allegations that it dragged its heels in fixing the sinkholes that erupted around Centurion some years ago.

In 2022 and 2023, Beknor CC, trading as Crawdaddy’s Centurion, obtained court orders from the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, that the city had to compensate it for the profit losses the restaurant had incurred at the time.

The judgments were obtained by default, as the city was not in court to oppose them. While it did, meanwhile, compensate the outlet, the city recently returned to court to have the default judgments rescinded.

Its reason for not opposing the claim was that it faced so many claims at the time deriving from the sinkhole crisis that this one simply “fell through the cracks”.