DAR ES SALAAM: AFRICARRIERS Limited has lost its move seeking payments of about 7.5bn/- for the supply of commercial buses to Shirika la Usafiri Dar es Salaam (UDA).
This follows the decision of the Court of Appeal to dismiss the appeal Africarriers Limited, the appellant, lodged to challenge the decision of the High Court’s Labour Division, which ruled in favour of UDA and Equity Bank Tanzania Limited, the respondents.
“The appellant failed to comply with the rules, and we find under the circumstances, the High Court judge cannot be faulted for dismissing the suit since in essence the case was not prosecuted.
“…. we find the appeal unmeritorious, and henceforth, we dismiss it with costs,” Justices Winfida Korosso, Ignas Kitusi and Othman Makungu declared in their judgment delivered in Dar es Salaam recently.
During the hearing of the appeal, the appellant had implored the Court to find that the High Court erred by not considering other remedial measures under the umbrella of invoking the overriding objective principle.
The High Court was faulted for not considering an extension of time to file the witness statements instead of dismissing the suit.
On whether or not the court should have applied the overriding objective principle, the justices agreed with the High Court Judge and counsel for the parties that the rationale behind the Commercial Court Rules is to speed up cases of a commercial and business nature.
However, they said, this does not mean that rules to facilitate expediency should be infringed as urged by the learned counsel for the appellant, as rules are developed to be used and complied with and not for display purposes.
“We therefore agree with the High Court Judge that the overriding objective principle does not apply in the present case. In any event, the overriding objective principle is not invoked to help a party to circumvent mandator or, rules of the court,” the justices said.
They pointed out the appellant’s explanation for failing to file the witness statements in time, alleging to have innocently confused the dates.
The justices said that if that was the case, it would have been expected that upon realising the fact that he had confused dates as alleged, the appellant would have promptly proceeded to rectify the infraction by either withdrawing the filed witness statements
In the alternative, they said, the appellant would have applied for the extension of time to file the same, which, unfortunately, was not the cause he preferred.
