Godfrey Marawanyika
MEIKLES, a Zimbabwean company with interests in hotels to supermarkets, is suing the country’s stock exchange for $50 million (R582m) after its shares were suspended for about a week last month.
The ban on trading caused Meikles “major, substantial and unimaginable damages”, the firm said in a high court application in Harare, filed yesterday.
Meikles “is presently the subject of negative perception by investors and there is panic and great unease among the plaintiff’s creditors, bankers, members and other stakeholders”.
Meikles is taking legal action after the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE) banned trading in the shares for the week ending on February 23. The ZSE said it was seeking clarification over the Harare-based company’s financial results for the year to March, particularly the amount of Meikles capital held by the Reserve Bank.
“We have ten working days to respond,” ZSE chief executive Alban Chirume said. “I can’t say how or when we would respond for now as that can only be done after we have spoken to our legal representatives.”
Meikles “will seek government’s intervention” to resolve the dispute, chairman John Moxon said.
The firm’s assets include the TM Supermarkets chain, co-owned by Pick n Pay Stores, Tanganda Tea, the century-old Victoria Falls Hotel and a stake in the owner of Cape Grace Hotel on Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront.
Meikles published financial statements while negotiations over the balance held by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe were in progress, the central bank’s governor John Mangudya said in a letter to the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission dated February 13.
The amount later agreed on that was owed to Meikles was the equivalent of $53.3m, he said.