Summary

  • AFRINIC’s additional 2025 disclosure lists $877,929 in legal costs across five named payees.
  • Trinity Legal received a disclosed $464,708 and Me Mohammad M Namdarkhan $353,000. Together, the two lines equal $817,708, or 93.14% of the annual legal total.
  • The 2025 bill was $850,607 higher than the $27,322 disclosed for 2024—a 32.13-fold increase—but remained below AFRINIC’s legal totals for 2022 and 2023.
  • The current Board says a coordinated campaign of litigation cost AFRINIC millions and crowded out operational recovery. That is its explanation; the public table does not map any of the five amounts to a case, task, rate, authority or result.
  • The historic C&A Law engagement at $1,000 an hour explains why members want invoice-level evidence. It does not establish the rate of any 2025 payee and is not proof that the 2025 spending was unlawful.

The Board made a claim; the table created a test

On 12 March 2026, the people acting as AFRINIC’s Board told members that legal actions had cost the registry millions of dollars. Their update blamed what it called a coordinated series of proceedings driven by Cloud Innovation, Larus and associated advocacy campaigns. It said the resulting costs were obstructing audits, technology and staff reviews, community initiatives and possible fee relief.

That statement asked members to accept two propositions at once: that outside opponents caused the cost, and that the spending was part of protecting and restoring the registry. AFRINIC’s additional financial disclosure, last modified on 1 June, now provides a way to start testing those propositions rather than merely choosing a side.

The 2025 legal-cost table contains five lines. It lists $26,933 for Me Ashok Radhakissoon, $464,708 for Trinity Legal, $31,333 for BLC Chambers, $353,000 for Me Mohammad M Namdarkhan and $1,955 for A.O.Popoola LP. The total is $877,929.

The disclosure is valuable because it names recipients. It is incomplete because a recipient list is not a litigation ledger. It does not identify the proceeding attached to each amount, who instructed the work, which power authorised the instruction, which professionals performed it, how many hours were charged, what rates and disbursements applied, when an invoice was approved or what result AFRINIC received.

The Board’s narrative therefore remains a claim with an auditable burden. If opponents caused the bill, AFRINIC can connect each material cost to the act that made it necessary. If counsel protected the registry, AFRINIC can identify the protection obtained. If an expense was inherited from the Receiver or earlier management, the current Board can say so without pretending it originally authorised it.

Two names carry almost the whole number

Trinity Legal and Me Mohammad M Namdarkhan account for $817,708 of the disclosed total. That is 93.14%. Trinity’s line alone is 52.93%; Namdarkhan’s is 40.21%.

Concentration is not misconduct. A complex year can legitimately depend on one lead firm and one senior practitioner. A high share can reflect specialist knowledge, urgency or continuity across connected cases. None of those explanations appears in the table, however. Nor does the table show whether the payee named was the ultimate fee earner, whether taxes or junior counsel were included, or whether some amounts were accrued rather than paid.

The correct journalistic conclusion is therefore not that either recipient overcharged AFRINIC. It is that two transaction files should explain nearly the whole year. Those files should contain the engagement, scope, authority, invoice, time or fee basis, work product, approval, payment status, conflict record and outcome. If the spending was necessary and properly authorised, such a reconstruction protects the payees as much as it protects members.

Aggregate praise for legal defence cannot substitute for that evidence. Lu Heng’s agency doctrine asks who controls decisions while someone else bears the downside. AFRINIC’s members fund the institution; operators depend on its registry; lawyers and decision-makers can be paid without personally absorbing the opportunity cost. That arrangement requires a stronger record, not greater deference to titles.

The 32-fold jump needs context, not theatre

AFRINIC’s 2024 disclosure lists only $27,322 in legal fees, all under the Radhakissoon line. The 2025 total is $850,607 higher and 32.1327 times the 2024 figure.

That movement is newsworthy, but it is not proof of a sudden scheme. Accounting timing can produce sharp changes. A bill may be accrued in one year and paid in another. A matter may move from limited advice to urgent hearings. Classification may change. The public table does not explain whether any of those possibilities applies.

The longer comparison also prevents a convenient exaggeration. AFRINIC lists $1,250,528 in legal fees for 2022 and $1,133,630 for 2023. The 2025 figure is below both. The four-year record is a high-high-low-high pattern, not an endlessly rising line.

That pattern makes the question more precise. What changed in 2024, when the disclosed amount fell to $27,322? What changed again in 2025, when five payees appeared and the total returned to $877,929? Were cases concluded, transferred, newly instructed or reclassified? Did the Receiver approve the work? Was any commitment directed by a court? Which amount protected continuity, which prolonged an avoidable dispute and which is recoverable from another party?

Until those questions are answered, both triumphalist claims are premature. The Board cannot prove responsible defence merely by saying opponents forced the expense. Critics cannot prove fraud merely by pointing to a multiplier.

Nearly $1.92 million went to law and elections in one year

The legal table did not appear in isolation. AFRINIC separately disclosed $1,043,425 in costs for its two 2025 Board election processes. Adding that figure to the $877,929 legal total produces $1,921,354.

The categories should remain separate. Some election costs were legal, administrative or court-facing in character, but AFRINIC presented them as election costs. Double counting would be misleading. The combined figure is useful for only one reason: it shows how much of the year’s visible extraordinary burden was tied to conflict and governance repair.

AFRINIC also listed $854,266 in other expenses for 2025. The legal total alone exceeded that category by $23,663. That comparison does not say legal defence was less valuable than computers, remote sites, insurance, staff benefits or member training. It says the opportunity cost is material enough that the Board’s own claim about crowded-out recovery must be tested line by line.

If $464,708 protected a critical order, prevented a registry failure or preserved a large claim, members should be shown that relationship. If $353,000 funded work that remains useful, identify it. If any cost arose because internal governance failed to create lawful instructions, record that too. “Litigation is expensive” is an observation, not an account.

The old $1,000 rate cannot be pasted onto new names

NRS’s June 2026 member alert highlighted a C&A Law engagement from October 2021 that stated professional fees of $1,000 an hour, excluding 15% VAT and disbursements. It also noted that at least two members of that firm were to remain available and that the public record did not show whether simultaneous work was billed separately.

Those terms warrant scrutiny. They do not prove how many hours were ultimately billed, which rates were applied to which people, or whether a combined $2,000 hourly charge occurred. More importantly for this disclosure, they do not establish anything about the 2025 rates of Trinity Legal, Namdarkhan, BLC Chambers, Radhakissoon or A.O.Popoola LP.

Conflating the documents would weaken the audit. The historic engagement supplies a lesson about necessary evidence: without invoices and time records, a headline rate cannot be converted into a proved total or a legal conclusion. The 2025 table presents the inverse problem: totals without disclosed rates, hours or scopes.

The two records belong in the same accountability story only at that level. One cannot be used to manufacture missing terms for the other. Neither a $1,000 clause nor an $877,929 annual total is inherently illegal. Authority, performance, procurement, conflicts, proportionality and applicable law determine the serious conclusion.

The current Board inherited the bill—and owns the disclosure duty

The current Board took up its claimed role after the September 2025 election. The public chronology therefore does not support saying it authorised every engagement made during the year. Some instructions may belong to the Receiver, management, a continuing delegation or a court-directed process. Each possibility must be proved for the relevant transaction.

But the Board now publicly defends a causal explanation for the spending and controls the institutional response. That gives it a present obligation: do not ask members to validate inherited value through aggregate accounts alone.

The Board should publish a case-by-case schedule that identifies the initiating decision, lawful authority, counsel, scope, professionals, rate basis, invoice, payment treatment, result and any cost-recovery decision. It should also separate approval of the financial statements from ratification, waiver or release of disputed acts. A fair-presentation vote is not automatically a finding that every commitment was authorised or valuable.

The reviewer cannot report to the Receiver, the purported Board, a payee or management involved in processing the transactions. Independence matters because those institutions publicly collaborated after the election and may have interests in how the inherited record is described.

This is the power-liability test in practical form. A registry can impose high-consequence decisions on members whose ordinary exit is limited. Its internal actors must not be allowed to convert that dependence into a lower documentary standard. The more indispensable the institution claims to be, the stronger its burden to show who spent what, under which power, for which result.

AFRINIC’s new table proves five amounts, one total, a sharp year-on-year change and heavy concentration. It does not prove fraud or illegality. It also does not validate the Board’s attribution of cost and value. The missing bridge is the transaction record—and the institution that says legal warfare consumed millions now has to build it.

For deeper context, read BTW Research: AFRINIC’s hidden scandal: how legal fees exposed a culture of corruption.

Sources