- LSK special general meeting was held on Monday and amid the chaos eight council members were suspended.
- Several lawyers have filed cases in court seeking to remove Havi as the president LSK.
Image: FILE
The High Court has certified as urgent a case filed by six lawyers challenging implementation of resolutions made at the LSK special general meeting on Monday.
The lawyers led by Lempaa Suyianka moved to court in a bid to quash the proceedings of the SGM held on Monday.
Justice Pauline Nyamweya certified the case as urgent but declined to stay the proceedings until she hears the both parties on the issue of internal remedies.
“While ordinarily they would have met the threshold of an arguable case, in the present application they have also sought to be exempted from an existing internal remedy. Both parties therefore need to be heard on this request before the question of leave is considered,” the judge ruled.
However, the judge has directed the Law Society of Kenya to disclose at the inter-parties hearing the entire resolutions made at the impugned SGM.
The court noted that Lempaa and his colleagues had provided evidence of the notice of the impugned SGM proceedings and some of the resolutions made in the meeting.
But the court noted that even though the evidence to show that the impugned resolutions have already started being implemented, the entire corpus of resolutions made at the impugned SGM is not evident.
“This information and evidence therefore needs to the disclosed by LSK at the inter-parties hearing in order to guide the court in determining the issue of whether or not stay can be granted,” the court ruled.
The case will be heard on February 4 before Justice Jairus Ngaah when all the parties will be in court.
In his affidavit, Lempaa argues that despite 3000 members registering to participate in the SGM online president Nelson Havi excluded all the online attendees from the decision-making and denied them the opportunity to vote on any issue at the special general meeting.
Lempaa claims that the LSK president Havi has already issued a series of nine letters purporting to implement all the impugned resolutions that were passed at the SGM.
Ochiel says Havi obstinately excluded the six lawyers and other online attendants from the decision-making thereby denying them the opportunity to vote on any issue at the meeting.
According to court documents, the lawyers spent the entire meeting begging Havi to allow them to participate and Lempaa says he is aware that from the start of the meeting at 11.38am until 12.42pm they made 397 requests for a poll on the chat platform.
“Again, I am aware that from 1.51pm to 5.35pm we made 333 requests for a poll on the chat platform. Altogether, they made 730 requests for a poll” Lempaa claims.
Lempaa claims that the 200 lawyers present physically at the LSK offices could in fact log in and voted virtually.
He alleges that Havi directed that those who were off-video and muted on zoom webinar format to vote by a show of hands of those present.
“Effectively, only 200 members present at Gitanga Road participated in the meeting and from their conduct in the meeting, I genuinely believe that the 200 members were largely a carefully chosen cabal of the president’s underlings,” Lempaa argued.
Edited by Henry Makori