A small local black-owned company has won an interim order against international technology appliances supplier Gestetner in the Johannesburg High Court.
Judge Phillip Boruchowitz granted Zenzele Automation interim relief by ordering Gestetner to honour its obligations in terms of its dealer agreement by ”maintaining uninterrupted supply of equipment and spares, consumables, machines and services”.
The order will be made final or reversed after the matter has gone to trial, and Zenzele was on May 10 given 30 days to summon Gestetner to trial or their dealership will remain cancelled.
Established in 1995 with a view to creating a self-sufficient black-owned and staffed office automation company that would concentrate its services in the government and parastatal arenas, Zenzele entered into a dealership agreement with the South African branch of London-based Gestetner in the same year.
According to the agreement, Gestetner would provide office equipment that Zenzele would sell to clients.
For lack of an affirmative action plan, Zenzele argued, Gestetner found Zenzele a convenient vehicle to obtain government tenders. The partnership was successful until a battle ensued over clients.
The acrimony between the companies intensified last month when Gestetner wrote a letter to the Gauteng government, the chief client, requesting ”permission to service, supply and invoice Zenzele customers … until we have formalised the appointment of our proposed new dealer, Qwephesha Office Automation”, to effectively replace Zenzele.
In the letter Gestetner accuses Zenzele MD Cornelius Hlatshwayo of failing to implement minimum acceptable policies and procedures, and of staffing ”the entire Zenzele with close family members”.
It became necessary, says the letter, to outsource the technical service and administrative functions to Gestetner and terminate the agreement at the beginning of April.
Hlatshwayo denied the accusations, protesting that Gestetner ”has always sought to manipulate Zenzele, interfering with its business and threatening to end the agreement”.
Judge Boruchowitz said that Gestetner’s ”exact nature of business with Zenzele was very vague”. While the court papers alluded to ”administration outsourcing”, said the judge, ”Gestetner seems to literally run Zenzele’s business”.
Zenzele’s affidavit further characterised the contractual relationship between the two as being ”generally a manipulative and controlling one”. The approach of the directors of Gestetner has been to ”make demands against an implicit threat of cancellation of the dealer agreement”, said the affidavit.
Soweto-based Zenzele argued that Gestetner had purloined for itself, among others, the Gauteng government as a client. Gestetner also removed from Zenzele the Viking business software program through which Zenzele performs its administrative and business functions. This put Zenzele out of business for six weeks.
Gestetner countered that Zenzele dishonoured the agreement by failing to pay timeously, at once breaching the dealership agreement and rendering it null and void.
However, it emerged that Zenzele had handed Gestetner a cheque for R1-million on April 3, which Gestetner returned, and another cheque for R1 008 000 two days later. On that basis the court decided that Zenzele had complied with the agreement and ordered relations to return to normal.