Please Call Me battle in top court

The 15-year legal battle to try to persuade Vodacom to pay Kenneth Makate for his ‘Please Call Me’ idea neared the end of the road with a hearing in the Constitutional Court yesterday, notes Legalbrief. A report in The Mercury says the court heard his application to appeal against a High Court order dismissing his case, although finding that he had indeed entered into an oral agreement with Vodacom’s head of product development at the time, Phillip Geissler, in 2001 that if his idea was commercially viable, he would be paid. The concept made Vodacom billions of rands, notes the report. The High Court found that Geissler had not had the authority to make the contractual agreement on behalf of Vodacom and Makate had waited too long to make his claim. And the SCA dismissed Makate’s application because his case did not have reasonable prospects of success. The Constitutional Court reserved judgment.