Chiefs’ brand battle reaches court
Boitumelo Khutsafalo | Saturday October 1, 2022 06:00
The club is currently run under two parallel management committees that are now in a legal battle to be declared the legitimate office bearers. The legal tussle is reportedly centred around the transformation of the club from a society to a company, Mochudi Centre Chiefs (Pty) Ltd.
Although the club chairperson, Victor Kobe who heads the executive committee on the society side, could not go much into detail, he did confirm that the matter will now be heard before the courts. The society has reportedly filed the matter with the Gaborone High Court with Mochudi Centre Chiefs Sporting Club as the applicant. Mochudi Centre Chiefs (Pty) Ltd has been cited as the first respondent while Ramocha Tsieng, Molefi Sexton Kowa, Edwin Luxury Mothulatshipi (former chairperson) and the Companies and Intellectual Property Authority as the second, third, fourth and fifth respondents respectively.
For some months, the club has been hard at work trying to turn the Kgatleng side from a society to a company. Recently, the club announced that the transformation process has been successful and that it was now operating as a company.
However soon after the announcement, information emerged that there was a looming legal tussle as some members of the club felt some processes were bypassed in the club attaining the company status. During a recent interview with this publication, Kobe confirmed that they were not about to let the club take the transformation route without following the right procedures. “What they (previous committee) should have done was to come back to the general membership again so that we can give them another mandate to transfer those properties but that is not what they have done,” Kobe said yesterday.
At the time he also said the society was still in place because it was not completely dissolved.