Investec Bank and its former legal counsel are at loggerheads over documents in the latter’s position which the lender fears contain sensitive client information.
Business Day understands that Investec in January approached the high court in Johannesburg on an ex parte basis, meaning without notifying the other party, seeking to seize documents in Prithie Pillay’s possession after her dismissal by the company.
The lender also asked the court for an interdict restraining Pillay or her associates using, distributing, copying [or] publishing the information in her pending the outcome of an application for final relief on the same terms.
This is after Investec found that Pillay, who was its in-house lawyer for many years until she was dismissed after a disciplinary hearing at the end of January had moved a “large number” of its documents. She did so by emailing 199 of the documents from her Investec account to her private email address and printed out about 120 documents.
The email address to which the documents were transmitted bore an entity called Anchor Technical Tapes domain name, a company that belongs to Pillay’s husband.
Investec told the court that it suspected that documents in Pillay’s possession contained “highly sensitive and confidential information” about its clients. The court granted the ex parte application, which Pillay appealed against.
Part of her appeal was the documents in her possession to allow her to appeal against her dismissal at the labour court.
Judge Stuart Wilson, who heard the appeal, found that while he had no reason to doubt that Investec sought to recover sensitive, confidential information — access to which it had a right to restrict — Investec cast a far broader net than that.
This was because some of the documents Investec seized did not include client’s information, with one of the documents referring to “Detox Diet” and a notice of a Discovery Insure AGM.
Investec’s lawyers said what triggered the company’s approach was when it found that the documents were transmitted to an email on Anchor’s server.
They argued that this created the reasonable fear that Pillay was about to disseminate the documents further, and that the only way to stop her was an ex parte approach to the court for an order to seize and preserve the documents.
This basis for its approach did not persuade Wilson, who ruled that the documents be preserved at the sheriff’s office.
Wilson’s order gives Pillay’s counsel access to that information to the extent necessary to draft a statement of claim to be issued in the labour court. The order also contains various other directions meant to preserve the confidentiality of the information as asked for by Investec.
“There was no dispute between the parties that the information seized and preserved under Cassim AJ’s order included information of a confidential nature concerning Investec’s clients, access to which ought properly to be restricted,” Wilson said.
“While there is no foundation laid on the papers for the suggestion that Ms Pillay would maliciously disclose that information to third parties, I accept that Investec is justified in seeking to restrict access to that information insofar as the restriction does not impede the preparation of Ms Pillay’s labour court claim. The order I granted manages the documents to that end.”
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