Summary

  • On 4 April 2023, Judge M. J. Lau Yuk Poon set aside Mabano Eddy Kayihura’s application against African Network Information Centre (AfriNic) Ltd because it had remained idle on the Supreme Court of Mauritius e-filing system since 12 September 2022 despite a Court circular dated 7 February 2023.
  • The application is identified as a Companies Act section 136 route, but the published order does not cite that provision, reveal the relief sought or decide whether Kayihura was a shareholder or creditor. His CEO or former-CEO title neither established nor defeated standing.
  • The durable lesson is institutional: a section 136 claim needs a complete, actively managed evidentiary packet, while AFRINIC’s neutral registry services should be ring-fenced from a corporate contest over who may seek judicial appointment of directors.

The file ended in one page. SC/COM/MOT/000500/2022 named Mabano Eddy Kayihura as applicant and African Network Information Centre (AfriNic) Ltd as respondent in the Commercial/Bankruptcy Division of the Supreme Court of Mauritius. The order did not narrate a corporate epic. It did not reconstruct a Board crisis, decide who should direct the company or pronounce upon the former chief executive’s intentions. It recorded a procedural state: the application had remained idle on the e-filing system since 12 September 2022. A Court circular followed on 7 February 2023. The inactivity remained. In Chambers on 4 April 2023, Judge M. J.

Lau Yuk Poon set the application aside.

Those sparse sentences answer the immediate question—why this application left the docket in that form—but they leave the corporate-law questions open. The matter is identified as an application under section 136 of the Mauritius Companies Act 2001. That provision offers a narrow route by which a shareholder or creditor may ask the Court to appoint directors when a company has no directors, or fewer directors than the quorum required for a Board meeting, and ordinary appointment under the constitution or section 140(3) is not possible or practicable. Yet the published order itself does not cite section 136.

It does not reproduce the originating motion, identify the appointment sought, state Kayihura’s asserted applicant class or evaluate a single statutory element. Procedural closure is therefore not an answer about standing or remedy.

This matters because the applicant carried a title that can tempt observers to skip the legal doorway. Kayihura had been AFRINIC’s chief executive. A later Court of Civil Appeal judgment records that he ceased to hold that office on 4 November 2022, after the e-file had become idle and before the April order. That later judgment is useful here only for this office chronology. “CEO” and “former CEO” are not applicant classes in section 136. Neither label proves that Kayihura was a shareholder or creditor; neither proves that he was not. The evidence needed to answer that question is absent from the published order.

The same discipline applies to the date. A separate listing associated with the matter records 6 April 2023, but the judicial instrument is dated 4 April. The face of the Court’s order controls the public account of when the order was made. The two-day discrepancy is not a licence to blend dates or speculate about an unrecorded event. It is a useful warning about source hierarchy: the instrument that performed the legal act has priority over a secondary date attached to its listing.

In this compact episode, four kinds of power must remain separate. A chief executive manages within authority granted by a company. A Board acts through corporate powers and valid decision-making machinery. A private technical registry maintains records and coordinates services. A sovereign court applies company law and grants or refuses legal remedies. None of the first three can borrow the authority of the fourth merely because Internet operations are important. And a Court’s procedural order should not be inflated into a merits judgment merely because the unanswered dispute is important.

That is the story within the story. A file associated with an urgent corporate remedy can still end because it is not advanced. When it does, the result may tell us almost nothing about whether the applicant could have crossed the statutory threshold, what appointment was requested or how the company’s interests would have been served. It tells us something different and equally concrete: legal remedies exist inside procedures, and procedures have to be used.