“All is fair in love and war…and business is war." (Jasmine Kundra)

When company directors are locked in dispute, one of them may be tempted to cut off the other’s access to emails and to the business server – a tactic likely to have immediate and serious consequences for the director thus cut off.

Its appeal as a tactic to force the other director to the negotiating table is obvious, but the question is whether the director thus deprived has any legal remedy available to force immediate restoration of access.

A recent Supreme Court of Appeal matter saw a director in that exact position trying to get his access back urgently with a “spoliation order” application.

“Cut off his email and server access”

When the two directors fell out, one (let’s call him ‘A’) applied for liquidation of the company on the grounds of deadlock. Director B opposed this application, and, alleging that A had resigned his directorship, instructed the web hosting entity hosting the company’s server and email addresses to cut off A’s ‘email and company network/server access’ with immediate effect.

A, denying hotly that he had resigned, immediately applied to court for a “spoliation order” restoring his email and server access to him.

Spoliation – a quick and effective way to get back possession, but only if…

• The spoliation process is designed to stop disputing parties from taking the law into their own hands and provides a quick and effective way of regaining possession of something if you have been wrongfully deprived of it. It’s a quick and effective remedy because “[T]he injustice of the possession of the person despoiled is irrelevant as he is entitled to a spoliation order even if he is a thief or a robber. The fundamental principle of the remedy is that no one is allowed to take the law into his own hands”. In other words, you can get an immediate spoliation order without having to prove your right to possession of the thing – all you have to prove is the wrongful dispossession.
  
  
• So that would have been an ideal outcome for A, giving him immediate restoration of his access to his emails rather than having to fight his way slowly through a full trial proving his rights to email and server access. But it was not to be. His problem was that, in order get a spoliation order, one of the first things you must prove is that you were in “peaceful and undisturbed possession” of something.
  
  
• Now A would have been able to prove such possession if he had for example been wrongfully deprived of use of a company car or even of an “incorporeal” right to use property (such as “quasi-possession” of a right of access under a servitude). But he was unable to convince the Court that his email/server access fell into any such category.
  
  
• As the Court put it: “Thus only rights to use property, or incidents of occupation, will warrant a spoliation order.” A’s prior use of the email address and server was not an “incident of possession of movable or immovable property”, it is purely “a personal right enforceable, if at all, against [the company]."
  
  
• In a nutshell, A must now prove his legal right to email and server access – perhaps he will be advised to apply for an ordinary interdict, perhaps he will sue for damages and/or re-instatement, but whichever course he chooses he will need to accept the inevitable delays. In other words, if B’s tactic was to put immediate and substantial pressure on A in the short term it worked – at least for now.

Don’t however take any action like this without professional advice – it could come back to bite you badly if it misfires.

Even if your marriage is collapsing around you, you might be afraid to sue for divorce because you have no money to survive on, plus you know that a hotly contested divorce might take years to finalise while your breadwinner spouse fights you tooth and nail every step of the way.

How will you support yourself and your children until the case is finalised? How will you pay your lawyer to run the case for you? Must you wait for the end of the case before you see a cent?

The answer luckily is “no” in that you have a relatively quick and simple remedy in the form of asking the court for “interim relief” in respect of –

• An order that your spouse pay you –
  
  
  • Maintenance (for children and/or for yourself) pending finalisation of the divorce,
    
    
  • A contribution towards your costs in the divorce proceedings,
    
    
• Interim care of, and contact with, your children (if there is any dispute over this aspect).

You may well hear this form of relief referred to in High Court divorces as a “Rule 43 application” (or, if your divorce is in the Regional Court, as a “Rule 58 application”), whilst the technical term for the maintenance is “maintenance pendente lite” (“maintenance pending the litigation”).

At this stage the Court isn’t interested in recriminations, or blame-finding, or the itemised details of your and your spouses’ financial positions. Those enquiries come later, during the actual divorce litigation. At this stage all it wants to know is how much you need, and how much your spouse can afford to pay.

A recent High Court judgment illustrates…

A “coy about his wealth” spouse ordered to pay up - now

• The warring spouses here are a senior banking executive and his wife, who qualified as a teacher but gave up that career to become a homemaker and mother to the couple’s two children.
  
  
• She asked the High Court for interim maintenance for herself and the children, and for a contribution to her legal costs.
  
  
• In assessing these requests the Court laid out some of the general principles involved –
  
  
  • Unless the care and residence of children is involved the issues are straightforward, relating to “the applicant’s reasonable needs, and the respondent’s ability to meet those needs. The applicant’s entitlement to maintenance must be assessed having regard to the standard of living enjoyed by the parties during the marriage.” This should be “a simple and straightforward calculation of needs and means”. (Emphasis supplied).
    
    
  • The aim is “to avoid substantial prejudice to either party pending divorce. It is not to provide a precise account of what is due to or from either party, according to the parties’ or the court’s sense of morality, propriety, the blameworthiness of the parties’ conduct during the marriage, or their habits of living after the separation.” The case should be cast in practical rather than moralistic terms, and the “emotional heat of a separation” should be kept out of it.

How much money could you be awarded?

Of course every case will be different, but where the parties have, as in this case, enjoyed a high standard of living, the figures can be substantial.

Here for example the Court’s awards were sizeable, commenting that the husband “is coy about his wealth, but there is little doubt that he has a substantial income” - just under R7m in the previous year - with “considerable resources” and an estimated net worth of just over R40 million. Moreover the couple had enjoyed “a very comfortable lifestyle” together.

The end result is that the husband must pay substantially what his wife asked for in the form of R1.6m immediately and thereafter R108k p.m. -

• R88,701-69 p.m. for the wife and children’s interim maintenance, plus school fees, extra mural activity costs, medical aid and medical costs
  
  
• Rental of up to R20,000-00 p.m., plus cost of utilities
  
  
• R34 656.39 for house moving costs
  
  
• R1,572,945-80 as a contribution towards the wife’s interim legal costs.

“…sexual harassment is a heinous and horrendous conduct since it undermines the dignity of women and the values enshrined in our Constitution.” (Extract from judgment below)

Employers have a strong duty to provide a safe workplace for their employees, and to protect them from harm – including sexual harassment. An employer who fails in this faces claims for damages and compensation, but as a recent Labour Court judgment shows, the victim must first follow procedure correctly, and without delay.

Delayed reporting kills a claim

A female employee claimed “a just and equitable compensation” from her employer after she was sexually harassed by two male superiors.

Her claim failed, the Court finding that her delay in reporting the incidents to her employer (two years in one case and three in the other) were……

The correct procedure, and the required timing

The employee’s claim was based on an allegation that her employer had contravened section 60 of the Employment Equity Act (EEA), which deems an employer guilty of a contravention and liable for the offending employee’s conduct unless it takes “the necessary steps to eliminate the alleged conduct and comply with the provisions of this Act” and “is able to prove that it did all that was reasonably practicable to ensure that the employee would not act in contravention of this Act.”

The Court set out the required steps by the victim as –

1. Allege a contravention at the workplace
   
   
2. Report the contravention immediately
   
   
3. Prove the alleged contravention
   
   
4. Allege and prove failure to take the necessary steps.

A victim who can prove all the above is entitled to a deeming order of liability, and to avoid liability it is then up to the employer to prove that it took the necessary and preventative steps.

The victim in this case had no trouble in proving that the incidents of sexual harassment had taken place, but she failed to convince the Court that she had brought the incidents to her employer’s attention “immediately” as required by the section. The Court referred to a previous decision of the Labour Appeal Court suggesting that the word “immediate” be given a “sensible meaning”. In that case a two-month delay in reporting was found to be acceptable as a “limited delay”. However the Court’s comment that “In my view, a delay is an antithesis of the word as literally defined” is a clear warning to victims – report incidents to your employer without delay!

In any event, held the Court, the victim’s delays in reporting (two and three years respectively) meant she had failed to report “immediately” as required.

The Court was equally unimpressed with her suggestion that she had indeed reported the incidents to her employer in time by discussing them with “colleagues and managers”. That, held the Court, was not enough: “As I see it, to my mind, the reporting must be to an employer through the mechanism in its adopted policy.” She had not done that, so there’s another clear lesson for victims there – make a formal report to the correct person/s in terms of your employer’s policies. 

Finally, said the Court, the employer had as soon as it received the reports, promptly investigated them and complied with its obligations in terms of the EEA.

Claiming from the offenders themselves

On a related note the Court mentioned that the victim would have a claim direct against the two employees who harassed her. Once again however, time is of the essence for victims – quite apart from the risk of the claim prescribing, the earlier formal reports are made the greater the credibility likely to be given to them.

Being an entrepreneur can be hugely rewarding, but it comes with a level of stress at the best of times, now magnified many times over by the pandemic’s uncertainties and disruptions.

Of course stress can be good for us, but only up to a point. “Bad stress” won’t just damage your ability to run your business, it puts your mental and physical health at severe risk.

So whatever else you do this year, make sure that coping with stress is high on your agenda – very high. Get 2022 off to a great start with these stress-coping mechanisms from a team of clinical psychologists on Stuff.