84 on LSK lobby list ‘inactive’ members

Attempts by a section of lawyers to force the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) to call for a special general meeting now hang in the balance after it emerged that some signatures by members were invalid.

The lawyers under the Okoa LSK lobby had last week given the LSK Council 14 days to call for the meeting to discuss among other things the controversial Sh1.2 billion office block and removal from office the council and other senior officials.

But LSK chief executive officer Apollo Mboya who confirmed receiving the notice said they would audit the list of signatures collected by the group to verify their authenticity.

The audit report from the LSK now shows that some of the members who had signed the petition were inactive, others were not in the LSK database while one of the purported signatories died in 2004.

Mr Mboya said the LSK secretariat was not opposed to the request but added that verification of the list of signatories was provided for in the law to ensure that the process was credible.

“The LSK Act is very clear on such petitions by members and this is what we are looking at to establish whether the list meets the threshold of at least 5 per cent of members from every branch,” said Mr Mboya.

He said Section 31 of the LSK Act requires that proper audit of the signatures appended in any petition be carried out to avoid a situation where some members can sign on behalf of colleagues.

Mr Mboya said that after verification of the signatures for requisitioning of the SGM, it emerged that 84 members were inactive, 17 not in the database, four had no clear determination on the persons listed because they had initials while one Griffin Ochieng died in October 4, 2004.

The CEO told the Nation that some of the members who were listed as having signed the petition had sworn affidavits denying that they appended their signatures.

The controversy over the international arbitration centre comes at a time when over Sh60 million has already been collected from members.