Summary

  • AFRINIC's 31 October 2026 statement rejects Cloud Innovation Ltd's entry in the Register of Members kept by the Registrar of Companies in Mauritius and says a Legal Notice demanding its immediate removal has been served.
  • The entry did not come from nowhere: a receiver acting under court supervision undertook in June 2025 to enter the company as a member, and the registrar's October extract records a start date of 9 October 2026. Membership, not address space, is now the contested instrument.

A registry can lose an argument about addresses and still keep its routing table. It cannot lose an argument about who its members are and keep its board. That is why the most consequential document in the AFRINIC–Cloud Innovation Ltd dispute this autumn is not a judgment about 6.2 million IPv4 addresses. It is a one-page statement about a corporate register in Port Louis.

On 31 October 2026 AFRINIC published a statement titled 'Official Statement on the Inclusion of Cloud Innovation Limited in the Register of Members, Mauritius'. In it the registry says it 'strongly objects to the purported entry of Cloud Innovation Ltd on the Register of Members kept by the Registrar of Companies, and has served a Legal Notice demanding its immediate removal', as carried on AFRINIC's own news index. The word doing the work there is 'purported'. A statutory register kept by a government officer and a registry's own membership roll are two different documents, and they now disagree about the same company.

The disagreement has a paper trail. CircleID's reporting on the case records that on 10 June 2025 the court-appointed receiver Gowtamsingh Dabee signed an undertaking to enter Cloud Innovation as a member under section 91 of the Companies Act, following an order by Justice C. Green Jokhoo dated 11 June 2025. The same reporting records that an extract from the Registrar dated 28 October listed Cloud Innovation as a member with a start date of 9 October 2026, that AFRINIC disputed the entry, and that the receiver subsequently demanded its removal. Read the three dates together — 10 June 2025, 9 October 2026, 31 October 2026 — and the shape of the problem is visible. The instrument was signed more than a year before the statutory record took effect, and the registry's public rejection came three weeks after the record did.

That sequence is what makes the case worth a reader's attention now. AFRINIC is not arguing that Cloud Innovation lacks addresses. It is arguing that Cloud Innovation lacks standing. And standing is the currency in which a court-supervised registry is actually governed.

The mechanism is not exotic; it is the ordinary law of corporate persons meeting the ordinary law of an institution under administration. Membership is the franchise. A registry whose board has been dissolved and reconstituted under court supervision is run, one election at a time, by whoever is entitled to vote. CircleID's February case report sets out how directly that franchise has been exercised: the court appointed Gowtamsingh Dabee as receiver in February 2025 charged with organising an election, he annulled a June 2025 election, and a September 2025 election returned eight directors. In an institution where the register of members is the electoral roll, an entry in that register is not paperwork. It is a ballot.

Set against that, the address-space dispute looks almost restful. CircleID's 'Registry under siege' records AFRINIC's August 2022 communiqué stating that Cloud Innovation had been allocated 6.2 million IPv4 addresses. AFRINIC's own domain still carries a legal section documenting the dispute with Cloud Innovation Ltd concerning the Registration Services Agreement and associated IPv4 resources, as visible on its legal proceedings page. Address space can be argued about for years in private correspondence and public communiqués without changing who signs the registry's decisions. The register of members changes that in a single line.

The litigation volume explains why the parties reached for the corporate register rather than the routing registry. CircleID's 'Africa is not a digital quarry' quotes AFRINIC's litigation FAQ stating that Lu Heng and associated entities have brought over 25 cases in Mauritius and 2 in Seychelles against the registry. A quarter-century of resource policy can survive twenty-five lawsuits. It has a much harder time surviving a shareholders' register that seats directors.

The appellate history shows how the two surfaces have traded places. The same CircleID analysis records that in October 2024 the Court of Civil Appeal, in a judgment delivered by Senior Puisne Judge N. Devat and Judge D. Chan Kan Cheong, set aside AFRINIC's appeal and restored the order placing the registry under the Official Receiver, while stressing the urgency of reconstituting AFRINIC's board. That is a court saying: this institution needs a board, urgently, and until it has one, an officer of the court will hold it.

Every subsequent step — the February 2025 receivership, the annulled June 2025 election, the September 2025 election of eight directors — is an attempt to answer that instruction.

And then, in the middle of answering it, the membership question reopened. Not because a court ordered addresses returned, but because the Companies Act gives a supervised officer a route to fix a register that the registry itself rejects. Section 91 is a technical provision. Applied to a company whose members elect the board of a Regional Internet Registry, it is a lever with a very long arm.

There is a live proceeding that could rearrange all of this again. CircleID's February case report records that Cloud Innovation's petition to wind up AFRINIC is listed by the court as case SC/COM/PET/000508/2025, that a February 2027 hearing was expected, and — in the same account — that no published order it reviewed fixed a February date. Treat the case number as the fact and the date as a reported expectation. A wind-up petition against a registry is not a private quarrel between two companies; it is a question about whether the institution that hands out African address space continues to exist in its current form. A membership entry that looks procedural in October 2026 could matter enormously in a courtroom in 2027, because a petitioner's standing can depend on exactly the status AFRINIC is now disputing.

So what would a verifiable repair look like? Not a communiqué, and not a press statement, however sharply worded. Repair on this surface has one test, and it can be written in a sentence: the registry's membership record and the Mauritian Register of Members must say the same thing on the same date, and the instrument that produced the change must be named. Until they do, Cloud Innovation Ltd holds an address estate the registry disputes and a membership the registry rejects, and each side can point to a document that proves it is right.

That is an uncomfortable place for an accountability story to sit, because it does not end with a winner. It ends with two institutions holding incompatible records and a receiver in the middle. But it is the honest shape of the case, and it tells operators and members something practical: when a registry is under court-supervised administration, the durability of a remedy depends on which register the remedy writes to. An order about address space binds a routing table. An order about membership binds a franchise. A remedy that only touches one of them is durable only on the surface it touched.

The visible record this article rests on is narrower than the dispute. It comprises five documents retained on 9 November 2026: AFRINIC's news index carrying the dated 31 October 2026 statement, AFRINIC's own legal-proceedings page for the dispute, and three CircleID articles whose provider-returned passages are quoted above. No Mauritian court order, Registrar's extract or Cloud Innovation Ltd statement was inspected directly, and every order, case number and registrar entry described here is attributed to CircleID's reporting rather than presented as an inspected primary record.

The undertaking dated 10 June 2025 and the order dated 11 June 2025 are not reconciled by any document reviewed. The text, service date, legal basis and recipient of AFRINIC's Legal Notice are not established either, and no Registrar of Companies decision accepting, rejecting, suspending or reversing the entry has been seen. Nor is it established whether Cloud Innovation Ltd disputes AFRINIC's characterisation of the entry. The 6.2 million IPv4 figure is AFRINIC's own August 2022 statement as reported by CircleID, not a figure audited here.

What is not in doubt is the direction of travel. A dispute that began over address allocation, and grew into a fight about receivership and elections, has now produced a document in which the registry formally rejects the membership of its largest resource holder — and a statutory record that says otherwise. Whoever wins the next round will have to win it on both surfaces at once. The alternative is what exists today: a registry that can refuse a member's standing while the register that governs companies in Mauritius records him.