On 9 November 2018, the High Court in Namibia declared a dawn raid conducted by the Namibian Competition Commission (NaCC) in September 2016 to be unlawful. The NaCC raided the premises of PUMA Energy on the basis of alleged abuse of dominance conduct in relation to the sale of aviation fuel at two airports in Namibia.

PUMA Energy challenged the validity of the search warrant and successfully argued that there was no basis for granting the search warrant. Consequently, the NaCC is obliged to return all documents seized during the raid to PUMA Energies.

In June 2018, the South African Competition Commission also lost a High Court challenge where the validity of a search warrant was at issue. The Pietermaritzburg High Court set aside the search warrant on the basis that the SACC failed to demonstrate that there was a bona fide “reasonable belief” that a prohibited act had been engaged in by the respondents in that case.

Competition lawyer, Michael-James Currie says that the use of search and seizure operations as an enforcement tool is being increasingly used across a number of African jurisdictions. Dawn raids have recently been conducted in Egypt, Kenya and Zambia in addition to Namibia and South Africa.

Currie says while dawn raids have been used effectively by well-established antitrust agencies, search and seizure operations are particularly burdensome on the targets and should only be used in those instances were no other less intrusive investigative tools are available. If competition authorities’ powers are not kept in check there is a material risk that search and seizure powers may be used as “fishing expeditions”.

Primerio director, John Oxenham, points out that the evidentiary threshold required in order to obtain a search warrant is relatively low. It is, therefore, concerning if enforcement agencies subject respondent parties to such an intrusive and resource intensive investigative tool without satisfying the requirements for obtaining a search warrant.

Despite these recent challenges to search warrants, Andreas Stargard, also a partner at Primerio, corroborates Oxenham and Currie’s view that the South African and Namibian competition agencies will continue utilising dawn raids as an investigative tool and in light of the increasingly robust enforcement activities, particularly by the younger competition agencies, companies should ensure that they are well prepared to handle a dawn raid should they be subjected to such an investigation.