A long dispute between four Namibian table grape companies and the Dutch importer Olympic Fruit regarding the legality of an exclusive sales agreement has finally been settled in the Dutch courts, it has emerged.
The Netherlands Arbitration Institute, with a bench of three judges presiding, ruled in favour of the Namibian companies – Nagrapex Holdings, Nivex Holdings, Exotic International and International Grape Company, who acted together as Navico – in their action against Olympic Fruit to terminate the sales agreement on 3 December 2011.
The dispute has resulted in protracted proceedings in Namibian and Dutch Courts, with Olympic Fruit winning several rulings in the High Court of Namibia as well as at home.
During the previous season, when the Namibian companies apparently started supplying three different receivers, Olympic arrested close to 100 containers of table grapes in Dutch warehouses.
Prior to this, in October 2011, the Namibian companies said they had found evidence of serious breaches on the part of Olympic Fruit in the performance of the sales agreement, as well as in the accounts it provided regarding the sale of the grapes.
However, Olympic Fruit continues to flatly deny any wrongdoing, with boss Thijs van den Heuvel telling Eurofruit at the end of last week that the recent arbitration decision was based only on his company's refusal to open its financial accounts to Navico.
Navico’s decision on 3 December 2011 to give Olympic Fruit notice regarding the termination of its contract followed thereported denial of access to Olympic Fruit’s accounts and the Dutch group's apparent refusal to grant an audit of accounts for the 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 seasons.
Further court hearings in Holland and Namibia followed in December 2011, resulting in the two parties reaching agreement regarding the sales of Navico grapes during the 2011/2012 season.
The parties also agreed to submit their disputes for settlement to the Netherlands Arbitration Institute.
Dusan Vasiljevic and Deon Brand, owners of the Namibian Companies, say they were vindicated by the Arbitration Institute’s ruling on 22 August that the sales agreement with Olympic Fruit was validly terminated on in December 2011.
The arbitration tribunal reserved judgment on claims for financial compensation by both parties and this will be heard as part of the second phase of proceedings some time in 2013.
The termination of the contract leaves the Namibian companies free to market their grapes through new channels and they have issueda public statementinforming customers that the Olympic Food Group has been replaced by Hillfresh International, also based in Barendrecht, as its sole distributor in Europe.
Deon Brand has confirmed that the Namibian companies will market around 1.2m grapes this season, with sales elsewhere in the world also being prioritised.
Earlier this year, Dusan Vasiljivic, who founded the Namibia business decades ago, sold one of the International Grape Company’s farms at Aussenkher to First Grapes, a new partnership between South African table grape producer-exporter Grape Alliance and leading topfruit and stonefruit exporter Dutoit International.
First Grapes is expected to boost the Grape Alliance table grape export volumes by some 700,000 cartons.
