Cida campus sale to be speeded up

Johannesburg - The battled it out in court last week, and in three days they will again come face to face in a meeting that it is hoped will help fast-track the sale of Cida City campus.

Anxious employees hauled curators of the Cida City campus to court last week, arguing that continued delays in selling South Africa’s first no-fee university was frustrating because they were left jobless when it closed in December.

Equally frustrated were students who have been left in limbo, their future bleak.

Represented by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), the workers approached the High Court in Joburg for an order directing the liquidators to convene a meeting with the parties involved. There, creditors would be allowed to vote and decide on all offers to buy Cida.

Accelerating the sale, argued LRC advocate Jason Brickhill, would ensure students were back in class receiving an education, because one of the entities showing interest had undertaken to reopen the doors of learning.

They LRC also pleaded for an interim interdict prohibiting the liquidators from disposing of Cida’s assets, pending a consultation with them.

“The application was necessitated by the liquidators’ failure to put any offers to the creditors for the purchase of Cida as a going concern and their repeated rejection of amended offers by Africa Integras (one of the companies offering to take up Cida operations) without regard to the views of creditors (staff and students included),” argued Brickhill.

“What emerges from their (liquidators’) answering affidavit is that the liquidators will only accept an offer for the full purchase price of R40 million.”

While offers have been made, the liquidators’ lawyer, advocate Francois Botes SC, said “in each of those offers… no monies are forthcoming”.

He said that while they had reached a memorandum of understanding with Africa Integras, the offer lapsed in July last year because the entity had not met “various suspensive conditions”.

But the LRC believes the liquidators are “preoccupied with maximising the returns on the sale of assets as their only objective”, disregarding the students’ constitutional right to education.

“The liquidators are acting unreasonably and unlawfully,” the LRC said. “The relief sought in this matter is designed to enable Cida to continue to fulfil its mission of providing tertiary education, without charge, to indigent black students in order to contribute to tackling intergenerational poverty.”

It also believes the liquidators should explain why they rejected the offer, saying all they were getting were “a range of vague, contradictory and unsubstantiated excuses for their rejection of the Africa Integras offer”.

Requests to get liquidators to consult creditors to discuss the offer had also been refused.

But Botes argued in court yesterday that the provisional liquidators were not bound by any law to hold a meeting with the creditors.

“What will the legal consequence of any resolution adopted from such a meeting be? It is very important for your lordship to understand the legal implications of such a meeting. They (liquidators) are saying we cannot be seen to be doing something the (Insolvency) Act doesn’t allow us to do. Liquidators do not have the right or authority to convene such a meeting,” said Botes.

But Judge Bashier Vally dismissed this as a narrow technical reading of the act and granted the LRC the order it wanted, directing the liquidators to consult creditors by convening a meeting on Saturday and allowing them to consider and vote on all offers.

The Star