SAM VALLEY FARMS LIMITED VS INTERPLAST

By Court: The Court has heard arguments by both Counsel for and against an application for stay of execution filed on behalf of the Plaintiff/Judgment Debtor Applicant. The Court has also read the affidavits for and against and perused the exhibits attached. The Court will lean favourably towards arguments made by Counsel for the Defendant/Respondent for the following reasons. It is trite that in application for stay of execution, certain conditions should be met. The first and most important should be that there should be an appeal pending and so far, no evidence has been deduced by the Applicant to satisfy this condition. Secondly, there must be exceptional circumstances to warrant a stay and the authorities are rife on this conditions. Merchant Bank v. Similar Ways [2012] SCGLR @ page 440: Standard Chartered Bank V. Western HardWood Limited [2009] SCGLR etc. Assuming that the contention by the Applicant which is that the notice of the entry of judgment was not served on the proper persons constituted special circumstance, what then is the position of the law? It is trite that the purpose of serving entry of judgment when it comes to an individual has to be personal and when it comes to companies, specified offices has been prescribed by the Companies Act on whom the notice is to be served. The main aim for this is to ensure the entry of judgment is brought to the notice of the responsible people for them to know that the execution process is about to commence. In this instance, in their Supplementary Affidavit in paragraph 6, the Respondent states that the entry judgment was served on one Aluba Mercy as an Administrative Officer. In paragraph 7- that the said Aluba Mercy is not the Administrative Officer of the company but as a casual labourer and so could not appreciate the nature of the document. These depositions without proof by the Applicant are just bare assertions. The Applicant could have supported their assertions with some documentary proof or could have challenged the Bailiff who swore to the affidavits of service of the entry of judgment on the said Aluba Mercy. Therefore on the strength of authorities such as Majolagbe v. Larbi [1959] GLR @ page 59, the Applicant assertions must fail as they are not substantiated. Therefore, if an Administrative Officer has been served or was served with the entry of judgment that should constitute sufficient notice since the Applicant is not saying that it did not receive the notice of entry of judgm