The court issued the order following a long commercial legal battle pitting AMI and a local businessman, Mr Navtej Singh Bains.
Also known as Trauma Centre, the multinational hospital, which operates from the Msasani suburb, will now be evicted from the premises owned by Mr Bains after it failed to pay rental bills for the past 26 months that accumulated to 1.6 million US dollars (about 3.2bn/-).
The hospital’s accounts at Exim Bank, which were attached by the court, were found to have been unfrozen and most funds emptied.
The order issued on May 7, 2015 and signed by Tanzania High Court Deputy Registrar, authorizes MEM Auctioneers and General Brokers to kick out the hospital from the building where the company is conducting its business.
This eviction will be effective after the expiry of a fourteen-day notice which has already been served to AMI. The order will lead to imminent closure of the hospital, despite several appeal attempts to stop the eviction.
The hospital failed to comply with a Tanzania Court of Appeal order to deposit in court 1.514 million US dollars plus a monthly rent to the tune of 64,000 US dollars per month following the tenancy agreement dispute.
A panel of three Court of Appeal judges, Justices Mbarouk Mbarouk, Salum Massati and Katherine Oriyo, had previously ordered AMI Hospital to make the deposits a month after the ruling which was issued on February, 12, this year.
The court made the ruling on civil application number 185 of 2014 filed by AMI in protest against execution of a ruling on main commercial suit number 104 of 2013 that it lost to its landlord (local business man Navtej Singh Bains) in respect of a premise where the company is conducting business.
AMI Hospital had lost the case filed by the landlord for failure to pay rent for the past 26 months in a commercial legal battle at the Tanzania Commercial Court in November 2014 and were issued with a notice for eviction by the landlord.
AMI subsequently filed for bankruptcy protection to the High Court of Tanzania stating that it was operating insolvently, having incurred losses for the past two years.
AMI Plc Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Mr Theunis Peter Botha, also a Director and CEO of the local AMI Hospital in Tanzania, filed the bankruptcy application in the High Court of Tanzania.
AMI Tanzania is a subsidiary of the London-based AMI Plc. In the bankruptcy petition filed in March, this year, before the High Court's main registry, the company alleged that it had been incurring losses in billions of shillings.
Daily News
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