Summary

  • The Receiver Gowtamsingh Dabee filed a termination-of-receivership application on 8 October 2025 under cause number SC/COM/MOT/000757/2025; on the located public record no discharge order has been issued.
  • On 12 March 2026 AFRINIC's own member update stated the application had been heard and judgment was awaited, with the Receiver still approving IP allocations and assignments.
  • The most recent dated instrument tying the Board to the Receiver is the 24 August 2026 CEO-designate announcement, issued jointly and expressly made "with the consent of the Receiver".

A recurring question about the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is who runs it. The question this article asks is narrower and more answerable from documents: which instruments the Receiver himself has placed on the public record, and what those instruments show about the authority that still constrains the elected Board.

The chain of instruments is short enough to state in full. On 12 February 2025 the court appointed Gowtamsingh Dabee as Receiver in place of the Official Receiver, an appointment later reflected in a Commercial Register extract citing section 278(2) of the Companies Act — even though judgment [2024] SCJ 473 and NRO statements cite section 178, a numbering discrepancy between instruments that has never been reconciled on the public record (source). On 20 June 2025, ICANN announced a court ruling it described as reinforcing its call for fair board elections and requiring the Receiver to issue a communiqué to members — an external party's recorded demand directed at the Receiver's own communication duties (source).

The Receiver's own application then moved the record. AFRINIC's termination notice records an application for termination of the receivership and the Receiver's release, cause number SC/COM/MOT/000757/2025, fixed for hearing on 26 November 2025; a court order of 29 October 2025 required any member wishing to intervene to seek leave by 12 November 2025 (source). The joint Board/Receiver communiqué of mid-October 2025 confirmed the 8 October 2025 filing date and stated that the court's decision was awaited (source).

The next dated instrument is AFRINIC's own. In a 12 March 2026 member update, the organisation stated that the Receiver's discharge application had been heard and judgment was awaited; the Receiver continued to approve IP address allocations and assignments that passed through the application process; Cloud Innovation Ltd objected to the discharge and called for a replacement receiver; and Cloud Innovation's July 2025 winding-up petition remained contested (source). This is the strongest located statement that the discharge had not been granted as of 12 March 2026 — a party statement, not a court record, but it is AFRINIC's own recording of its own status.

May 2026 brought court activity, but on a different docket. On 14 May 2026 the Supreme Court issued an interim order against Cloud Innovation Ltd following statements by its subsidiary Larus about alleged judicial sanctioning of leasing AFRINIC-allocated number resources, and allowed ICANN to intervene as a party in the winding-up petition, reference SC/COM/PET/000508/2025 (source). Neither item touches the discharge application.

The instrument that defines the current constraint is the most recent. On 24 August 2026 the AFRINIC Board announced Mike Silber as CEO Designate, to take office as Chief Executive Officer on 1 January 2027, in a communiqué issued jointly by the Board and the Receiver, with a recruitment process led by a CEO Search Committee initiated by the Receiver and the Board (source, source). The Board could announce; the Receiver's consent was a stated condition. A pattern observation follows: the 28 August 2026 constitution of an Appeal Committee under the PDP's conflict-resolution provisions, effective to 31 December 2026, appears in the news index without the consent formula (source). Whether that marks a genuine boundary of the Receiver's approval function or simply different drafting habits cannot be established from the located excerpts.

What the instruments do not show is a discharge. No final public discharge order was located by the search evidence cutoff used for this article; the search provider capped results, so the absence is bounded and is not proof that no order exists. AFRINIC's self-published court-cases page, the most directly relevant docket-like source, was not readable in the located excerpts (source). The bounded finding therefore stands: the latest dated instrument tying the Board's action to the Receiver's consent is 24 August 2026, and no instrument of discharge or release has been located after it.

For a resource member, the practical consequence is procedural. The 29 October 2025 order created a leave-to-intervene window in the very application that decides the custodian's exit — evidence that members have a recorded path into the receiver's fate, exercised through the Bankruptcy Division. What no located instrument supplies is a recorded answer to the question that matters most after discharge: which acts of the Board would still require receiver consent, if any, and on what instrument that residual constraint would rest.