Qamar Investments Limited v Seif & 2 others (Suing as Trustees of Seif Bin Salim Trust) (Environment & Land Case E079 of 2024) [2025] KEELC 3070 (KLR)

The defendants produced certificates of death showing the named defendants died decades before filing. Since a suit against a deceased person is a nullity, the entire suit was a nullity and the injunction application founded on it could not stand. The plaintiff's argument that substitution of living trustees could cure the defect was rejected because nullity begets nullity and the suit was incapable of resurrection.

The court accepted that courts should strike out sparingly and prefer orders sustaining suits where defects are curable, citing D.T. Dobie and Co-operative Merchant Bank v Wekesa. However, it distinguished those principles because the defect here was not a pleading deficiency but a fundamental nullity from inception, which amendment or substitution could not cure.

Although the plaintiff sought an interlocutory injunction on the basis of a registered 99-year lease and alleged forfeiture over arrears of Kshs.2,500 in ground rent, the court did not assess the Giella-type threshold. It held the application could not stand independently of the struck-out suit.

Relying on section 3(3) of the Trustees (Perpetual Succession) Act and Keekonyokie Community Trust v Parantai, the court noted the Seif Bin Salim Trust had been wrongly described by its former, deceased trustees. The correct course, had the suit not been a nullity, would have been suing the current trustees such as Saif Said Saif Al-Busaidy.