Summary

  • On 12 September 2023, the Supreme Court of Mauritius appointed the Official Receiver to “hold the ring”, preserve the status quo of AFRINIC’s assets and maintain the value of its business. It also restrained major structural changes and directed an election under AFRINIC’s existing constitution so that a proper Board and a Chief Executive Officer could return the company to ordinary governance.
  • AFRINIC had no quorate Board and no Chief Executive Officer. The judge had excluded its legal representatives from the 11 and 12 September proceedings after finding that they lacked a valid mandate from an operative Board resolution. That institutional failure made temporary custody necessary, but it did not enlarge the nature of the company or the receiver’s authority.
  • Keeping a live registry business intact required real discretion. The selected statutory powers allowed control of company property, continuation of business, recovery of income, employment of staff, professional assistance, agency and action on the company’s behalf. Those were working powers, not ceremonial ones.
  • The boundary was equally real. The powers were subject to the appointing order, directed to its objectives and constrained by the rights of people other than the company. Nothing in the order made the receiver a legislature for Internet-number policy, an adjudicator of resource ownership or a representative of an imagined regional sovereign.
  • A sound preservation regime would therefore document the objective and legal basis for each material act, separate company property from third-party rights, insulate technical services from governance experimentation, publish action receipts, return novel questions to court and define the conditions for handback to a lawful Board and Chief Executive Officer.

The order answered a corporate emergency with a corporate remedy. Four remaining directors were approaching the end of their terms on 18 September, while AFRINIC lacked the functioning organs needed to authorise counsel, conduct an election and appoint executive leadership. The Court froze relocation, takeover, merger, restructuring and changes of management control; placed the business in temporary custody; and required restoration through the constitution already in force. Preservation covered AFRINIC’s assets and business value.

It did not freeze the whole Internet, absorb operators’ rights into the company’s estate or transfer policymaking authority to the receiver.

That distinction matters because continuity cannot be achieved by passivity. Someone had to safeguard records, contracts, staff, income and the services of a going concern. Someone also had to make choices about the work needed to hold those things together. Yet operational judgment is not constituent power. The receiver could act so that lawful corporate organs would again be able to act; he could not use their temporary absence to invent a different source of legitimacy.

AFRINIC itself is a private, member-based technical bookkeeper, service provider and coordinator with zero sovereign, legislative, regulatory, police, prosecutorial, punitive, confiscatory or public-law adjudicatory authority. The receiver did not inherit a sovereignty AFRINIC never possessed.