Derek Achong

North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Davlin Thomas, has ob­tained an in­junc­tion against a so­cial me­dia ac­tivist who al­leged­ly made a se­ries of defam­a­to­ry posts about him. 

In an 11-page de­ci­sion de­liv­ered yes­ter­day, High Court Judge Mar­garet Mo­hammed ruled that the in­junc­tion against Naresh Siewah was war­rant­ed to pro­tect Thomas pend­ing the out­come of the case. 

“In my opin­ion, in grant­i­ng the in­junc­tion it would lim­it any fur­ther dam­ages to the claimant’s rep­u­ta­tion and re­strain or lim­it on the de­fen­dant with re­spect to mat­ters set out in the Face­book posts,” she said.

“The in­junc­tion cer­tain­ly does not re­strict the de­fen­dant from com­ment­ing on the claimant’s ac­tions with re­spect to oth­er mat­ters,” she added. 

Ac­cord­ing to the ev­i­dence in the case, the of­fen­sive posts were made be­tween March and June on a se­ries of Face­book groups. 

When Thomas’ lawyers Farai Hove-Ma­sai­sai and Jen­nifer Farah-Tull ini­tial­ly wrote to Siewah threat­en­ing le­gal ac­tion, Siewah wrote back beg­ging for for­give­ness. 

Stat­ing that he was un­em­ployed and could not pay com­pen­sa­tion, Siewah said: “Thanks in ad­vance and hope this mat­ter could be re­solved pri­vate­ly. Again, I am very sor­ry for the pain I caused. I re­gret it very much. I am ashame and sad. I am de­press al­so. Life is re­al­ly re­al­ly hard. I plea and beg on­to your client to please have mer­cy and for­give me for my wrong doing­ings (sic).”

De­spite his ad­mis­sion, when Siewah even­tu­al­ly re­tained a lawyer to de­fend the case, he claimed that he was not re­spon­si­ble for most of the posts as his ac­count had been hacked for sev­er­al months. 

The tri­al of the case is ex­pect­ed to take place lat­er this year. 

Siewah is be­ing rep­re­sent­ed by Leon Kallicha­ran.