Richard Muponde Senior Court REPORTER Bulawayo businessman Delma Lupepe is embroiled in a messy five-year legal wrangle with his former employee Tendai Madzorera over a house which the tycoon allegedly offered for sale, but later reneged on the agreement.
The matter is going for a pre-trial conference on Monday.Lupepe, through one of his companies Electrical and Computer Technology Enterprises (Pvt) Ltd, approached the Bulawayo High Court in 2006 seeking to evict Madzorera, a former Zifa vice-chairman, from a house in Fortunes Gate, Bulawayo. The matter has been dragging in court since then with claims and counter-claims coupled with accusations and counter-accusations.
Madzorera reportedly occupied the house when he was a general manager at one of Lupepe’s companies, Zimbabwe Express Services (Pvt) Ltd before he retired in May 2001. Lupepe also wanted Madzorera to pay Z$40 000 rentals for the period he occupied the house after the end of his contract. However, Madzorera is refusing to vacate the property arguing that Lupepe offered to sell the house to him and he accepted the offer and was only waiting for him to give him the price.
“Defendant (Madzorera) avers that he is entitled to occupy the property in question in that the property was offered to him for sale by the plaintiff through its duly authorised director (Lupepe) and such offer was accepted by the defendant with the result that a valid and binding agreement came into being,” Madzorera said in his plea and counter-claim. “That is to say, plaintiff offered and defendant accepted to buy the property in dispute at a cost and such was to be quantified by plaintiff at any time that it so desired.”
He said Lupepe should honour the contract or buy him out through a payment of the market value of the property, as well as compensate him for improvements he made to the property. In his affidavit, Lupepe said he never entered into any agreement with Madzorera to sale the house to him, but was given a severance package as full and final settlement after the termination of his contract.
“The only property which the respondent (Madzorera) was awarded by the applicant is an Isuzu 320 V6 vehicle registration number 726-917B. I beg to annex the contract vesting ownership of vehicle to respondent as ‘E’. I as one of the directors of the applicant never extended any offer to sell the house as the respondent is alleging,” Lupepe said. “Neither did Mrs Grace Lupepe point it out to me that she promised to enter into an agreement of sale with the respondent of the property in question.”
He claimed that what Madzorera was saying was untrue. Lupepe is set to lose three of his houses after a number of banks in the city swooped on the properties which they intend to auction to recover undisclosed debts his companies owe the financial institutions.
