Summary

  • Larus Cloud Service Limited sought the injunction in SC/COM/MOT/000334/2022, restraining AFRINIC and associated actors from proceeding with a Board-election process announced on 10 May 2022, including electronic voting due to begin on 19 May and an annual meeting scheduled for 3 June.
  • The interim restraint began on 16 May 2022. On 12 September 2023, a different Supreme Court order appointed the Official Receiver for AFRINIC; the later sitting record reported that he had been specifically ordered to organise an election as soon as possible.
  • On 25 September 2023, after Larus Cloud moved to withdraw, the Supreme Court of Mauritius set aside the matter, discharged the interim order and made no order as to costs. The restraint had lasted 497 calendar days.
  • The dates cannot be collapsed. The receiver order on 12 September supplied the reason for ending the earlier election case; the set-aside and discharge occurred on 25 September. That distinction reveals how temporary protection can outlive the corporate setting it was designed to preserve without becoming a ruling on the merits.
  • The sound response is neither to deny courts the power to protect a disputed process nor to pretend a private registry becomes a government during litigation. It is to give every interim control a dated, reviewable lifecycle receipt, alongside a map of technical functions that remain unaffected.

The order at the end of the file

On Monday, 25 September 2023, the parties themselves were not in attendance at the Supreme Court of Mauritius. Their lawyers were. The Commercial Division sitting record names Larus Cloud Service Limited as the applicant, with African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC) Ltd and Executive Services Limited as respondents. Judge P. D. R. Goordyal-Chittoo was presiding. The document is short, but it records an institutional turn that had taken nearly a year and a half to arrive.

Counsel for the respondents reported that Judge Lau Yuk Poon had delivered a judgment appointing a Receiver for AFRINIC. Counsel appearing for Larus Cloud concurred. The Official Receiver, V. Virasami, told the court that the oral judgment appointing him had been delivered on 12 September, and he tendered a copy of the order. Then the connection to the older case was made explicit: the Receiver had been given a specific order to organise an election as soon as possible, while Larus Cloud's application concerned the election process.

Counsel for Larus Cloud therefore moved to withdraw the application and asked that the interim order be discharged.

The court's disposition was spare. It set aside the present matter, discharged the interim order and made no order as to costs. It did not pronounce the planned 2022 election valid or invalid. It did not decide wrongdoing, contempt, damages or operational loss. It did not award either side a victory on the underlying merits. The document instead captures an earlier restraint ending because a later exercise of judicial authority had produced a different person, a different corporate control structure and a new route to an election.

Read only from the final page, this can look like tidy procedural housekeeping. Measure backward, however, and the proportions change. A later published court order quotes the interim restraint in this same matter as having been issued on 16 May 2022. The distance between that date and the discharge on 25 September 2023 is 497 calendar days. What began as protection around one announced Board election remained legally operative until the organisation was under receivership and a court-appointed official had received a fresh election mandate.

That duration is not proof that the interim order was wrongly granted. It is evidence of something more exact and more useful: temporary judicial control can persist long enough for the corporate object it protects to be superseded. An institution that depends on elections, contracts and continuous technical service needs a way to make that changing state intelligible while it is happening, not merely after the closing order is found.