https://new.kenyalaw.org/akn/ke/judgment/keelrc/2026/2084

Shakombo & another v Registrar of Trade Unions & 11 others (Employment and Labour Relations Petition E009 of 2026) [2026] KEELRC 2084 (KLR) (20 July 2026) (Ruling) Neutral citation: [2026] KEELRC 2084 (KLR) Republic of Kenya In the Employment and Labour Relations Court at Mombasa Employment and Labour Relations Petition E009 of 2026 K Ocharo, J July 20, 2026 Between Matano Omar Shakombo 1st Petitioner Abdalla Nuru Ali 2nd Petitioner and Registrar of Trade Unions 1st Respondent Salman Otieno Owour 2nd Respondent R.K. Nyaga 3rd Respondent Commissioner For Labour 4th Respondent The Attorney General 5th Respondent and Dock Workers Union 1st Interested Party Amin Iloti 2nd Interested Party Bernadette Bahati 3rd Interested Party Ruwa Mpate 4th Interested Party Kibiby Omeri 5th Interested Party Maskat Mohammed Salim 6th Interested Party Patrick Granton 7th Interested Party (Being a Ruling on the Notice of Motion Application dated 19th June 2026, seeking stay of execution, conservatory orders and injunctive relief pending the hearing and determination of the intended appeal against the Judgment of this Court (Ocharo Kebira, J.) delivered on 17th June 2026) Ruling A. Introduction 1.A court of equity will readily stay its hand to preserve the subject matter of a pending appeal; it will just as readily refuse to lend its authority to preserving, even temporarily, that which it has already found to have no lawful existence at all. That, in a sentence, is the fate of the Application now before this Court: an invitation, dressed in the language of stay pending appeal, to keep alive by injunction an office and an electoral outcome that this very Court, after a full and contested hearing, found to be a sham, null and void ab initio. It is an invitation the Court must, for the reasons that follow, decline. 2.The Application in focus in this Ruling is the Notice of Motion dated 19th June 2026, filed by the 2nd Respondent and the 2nd to 7th Interested Parties (“the Applicants”). This Ruling is confined to that Application alone. Other interlocutory matters that have since found their way onto the record, including the Supplementary Affidavits touching on the composition of the Election Board and the application dated 26th June 2026 concerning disciplinary proceedings taken against the 2nd Respondent, are addressed only to the extent that they bear upon the disposal of the 19th June Application, and are otherwise left to be dealt with in their proper place and time. 3.The Court has carefully considered the Notice of Motion, the Certificate of Urgency, the Supporting Affidavit of Sulman Otieno Owuor sworn on 19th June 2026, the Supplementary Affidavits filed in the course of these proceedings, the Grounds of Opposition, Replying Affidavits and Written Submissions filed on behalf of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Petitioners, and the record as a whole, and now renders itself as follows. B. Background 4.By a Judgment delivered on 17th June 2026, this Court, after a full hearing of the Petition and upon consideration of the pleadings, affidavit evidence and submissions of all the parties, made the following findings and consequential orders:(i)that the elections of the Dock Workers Union conducted on 4th April 2026 were a sham and were accordingly declared null and void and nullified;(ii)that the Union shall conduct fresh elections in accordance with its Constitution, constitutional principles and values, and the relevant statutory provisions, within sixty (60) days from the date of the Judgment;(iii)that the registration of the purportedly elected officials arising from the elections of 4th April 2026 was nullified; and(iv)that the Election Board which was in office prior to the nullified elections shall conduct and oversee the fresh elections. 5.Following delivery of the Judgment, the 1st Respondent, by a letter dated 23rd June 2026, confirmed compliance with the Court's orders: the registration of the officials purportedly elected on 4th April 2026 was cancelled, the Register of Trade Unions was corrected accordingly, and the officials who were lawfully in office immediately before the impugned elections were reinstated pending the conduct of fresh elections. The 1st Interested Party's National Executive Council thereafter issued a Circular to the membership fixing fresh elections for 13th August 2026, to be conducted by what the Circular described as the “duly constituted” Election Board. 6.Aggrieved by the whole of the Judgment, the 2nd Respondent and the 2nd to 7th Interested Parties lodged a Notice of Appeal dated 19th June 2026, and on the same date filed the Notice of Motion which is the subject of this Ruling, together with a Certificate of Urgency. The Application sought temporary stay and conservatory orders pending the hearing of the Application itself, and thereafter stay of execution, implementation and enforcement of Orders (i) to (iv) of the Judgment, together with ancillary injunctive relief restraining the conduct of fresh elections and the assumption of office or mandate by the designated Election Board, pending the hearing and determination of the intended appeal. 7.For the tidiness of the record, it is necessary to note that a further application dated 26th June 2026, touching on disciplinary proceedings taken against the 2nd Respondent, also came before this Court. By interim orders made in that application, the Court stayed the disciplinary action complained of and directed that the said application be kept in abeyance, to pave the way for the hearing and determination of the earlier Application dated 19th June 2026, being the Application now under consideration. Nothing in this Ruling determines that later application, which shall proceed on its own footing once this Ruling has been rendered. 8.It is also necessary to record that, while the 19th June Application was pending hearing, the 2nd Respondent swore a Supplementary Affidavit on 30th June 2026 and a further Supplementary Affidavit on 8th July 2026, raising, for the first time, the contention that the Election Board designated under Order (iv) of the Judgment is not properly constituted, on the footing that six of its nine members have since been promoted out of the unionisable cadre of the Kenya Ports Authority, and that a further member is presently under suspension. The 3rd Petitioner, Justine Muranja Angore, filed a Supplementary Affidavit in response, contending, among other things, that Article 15(1)(e) of the Union's Constitution expressly permits persons who are not members of the Union to serve on the Election Board, and that the point is in any event improperly raised in an application for stay of execution. The Court returns to this issue below. 9.By the time the Application came up for hearing, prayers 1, 2 and 3 of the Notice of Motion, being prayers for certification of urgency and for temporary and conservatory orders pending the hearing of the Application itself, had been overtaken by the passage of time and the hearing of the Application inter partes. What remains for determination are prayers 4 to 9 of the Notice of Motion, being the substantive prayers for stay of execution of the Judgment and ancillary injunctive relief pending the intended appeal. C. The Applicants' Case 10.The Applicants' case, as set out in the Notice of Motion and amplified in the Supporting Affidavit of Sulman Otieno Owuor, may fairly be summarised as follows:(a)that the Applicants are aggrieved by the entirety of the Judgment and have lodged a Notice of Appeal against the whole of it;(b)that the intended appeal raises weighty and arguable questions of law and fact, including an alleged contradiction between the finding that no elections took place on 4th April 2026 and the simultaneous nullification of those very elections;(c)that the intended appeal will also challenge the manner in which allegations of forgery, fabrication of minutes, falsification of records and manipulation of attendance registers were determined on affidavit evidence alone, without oral evidence, forensic examination or cross-examination;(d)that the intended appeal raises questions on the burden and standard of proof under Sections 107, 108 and 109 of the Evidence Act, and on the doctrine of estoppel arising from the alleged participation, acquiescence and ratification of the impugned electoral process by some of the Petitioners;(e)that the intended appeal raises constitutional questions touching on Articles 36 and 41 of the Constitution, concerning freedom of association, democratic participation and the autonomy of registered trade unions;(f)that the Judgment contains positive, mandatory and self-executing orders whose implementation is imminent, and that once fresh elections are conducted, a new leadership structure will emerge, third-party rights will crystallise, and the substratum of the intended appeal will be irretrievably destroyed;(g)that the Dock Workers Union is among Kenya's oldest and most strategically significant unions, representing thousands of workers in the maritime sector, such that implementation before the exhaustion of the appellate process risks competing claims to leadership, institutional uncertainty and disruption to labour relations; and(h)that no prejudice will be occasioned to the Petitioners by the grant of stay, whereas the Applicants stand to suffer substantial, irreversible prejudice if implementation proceeds, such that the balance of convenience favours preservation of the status quo obtaining immediately before delivery of the Judgment. To support this, reliance is placed on the decision in Reliance Bank Ltd v Norlake Investments Ltd [2002] EA 227. 11.On the strength of the foregoing, the Applicants pray, in substance, for stay of execution of Orders (i) to (iv) of the Judgment, an injunction restraining the conduct of fresh elections and the assumption of office or mandate by the designated Election Board, an order preserving their registration status and the governance structures of the Union as they stood immediately before the Judgment, and costs of the Application to abide the outcome of the intended appeal. D. The Petitioners' Opposition 12.The Application is opposed, in substantially similar terms, by the 1st and 2nd Petitioners jointly and by the 3rd Petitioner separately, on the following broad grounds:(a)that the Application is misconceived and constitutes a deliberate attempt to frustrate a lawful Judgment rendered after a full hearing, in which this Court found the elections of 4th April 2026 unlawful and contrary to the Union's Constitution;(b)that the Applicants have failed to demonstrate substantial loss, it being settled law that the loss of a position obtained through an electoral process already found unlawful cannot amount to substantial loss, and that the Applicants remain at liberty to seek a fresh democratic mandate in the very elections ordered by the Court;(c)that the Applicants have offered no security whatsoever for the due performance of the decree, a mandatory requirement whose omission is fatal to the Application;(d)that the grounds advanced by the Applicants are, in substance, no more than a challenge to the correctness of the Judgment, a matter properly reserved for the Court of Appeal, and that mere dissatisfaction with a judgment, however genuinely held, is not a ground for stay;(e)that the Judgment has already been substantially implemented: the 1st Respondent has, by its letter of 23rd June 2026, cancelled the registration of the Applicants and corrected the Register of Trade Unions, and the 1st Interested Party has issued notice of fresh elections, such that the orders sought would not preserve but reverse acts already lawfully completed;(f)that the public interest, and the democratic rights of the Union's thousands of members to lawful and accountable leadership, weigh heavily against the grant of stay, and cannot be subordinated to the private interests of office-holders whose mandate has already been declared unlawful; and(g)that the Application ought, in any event, to be dismissed with costs. 13.In support of these submissions, learned counsel for the Petitioners relied on, among other authorities, Butt v Rent Restriction Tribunal [1979] eKLR, Kenya Shell Limited v Benjamin Karuga Kibiru & Another [1986] eKLR, Stanley Kang'ethe Kinyanjui v Tony Ketter & 5 Others [2013] eKLR, Teachers Service Commission v Kenya National Union of Teachers & 3 Others, Kenya Airways Limited v Aviation & Allied Workers Union Kenya & 3 Others, Mumo Matemu v Trusted Society of Human Rights Alliance & 5 Others, Judicial Service Commission v Speaker of the National Assembly & Another, Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission v Maina Kiai & 5 Others, Moses Masika Wetang'ula v Musikari Nazi Kombo & 2 Others, Oraro & Rachier Advocates v Co-operative Bank of Kenya Limited, Equity Bank Limited v West Link MBO Limited, and Board of Governors, Moi High School Kabarak & Another v Malcolm Bell. E. Analysis and Determination 14.The Court has given anxious consideration to the rival positions of the parties. Three broad questions arise for determination: first, what is the law applicable to an application of this nature; second, whether, applying that law, the Applicants have made out a case for the grant of stay pending appeal; and third, what order the justice of the matter demands. The Applicable Law 15.An application for stay of execution, implementation or enforcement of a judgment or order of this Court pending appeal is governed by Rule 21 of the Employment and Labour Relations Court (Procedure) Rules, 2024, read together with Order 42 Rule 6 of the Civil Procedure Rules, 2010, which Rule 21 imports into proceedings before this Court, and by the overriding objective under Section 3 of the Employment and Labour Relations Court Act. Order 42 Rule 6(2) requires an applicant to satisfy the Court that substantial loss may result unless the order is made, that the application has been made without unreasonable delay, and that such security as the Court may order for the due performance of the decree has been given. These conditions are conjunctive, and an applicant who fails to satisfy any one of them fails in the application as a whole. 16.The Rules of this Court, however, do not exhaust the field. Just as the Court of Appeal has held, in relation to stay pending appeal generally, that an applicant must additionally demonstrate an arguable appeal and satisfy the Court that, absent stay, the appeal would be rendered nugatory (Stanley Kang'ethe Kinyanjui v Tony Ketter & 5 Others [2013] eKLR), this Court is entitled, indeed obliged, to look beyond the bare text of the Rules to the wider equitable and constitutional principles that inform the exercise of a discretion of this kind, particularly where, as here, the subject matter of the Judgment sought to be stayed is not a monetary decree but a declaration touching on the lawfulness of the leadership of a public-facing trade union. It is to those wider principles that the Court now turns. 17.It is trite that an order for stay pending appeal is not granted as of right, and is not granted merely because a dissatisfied litigant has lodged, or intends to lodge, an appeal. In Butt v Rent Restriction Tribunal [1979] eKLR, the Court of Appeal held that the discretion to grant stay must be exercised judicially, upon sound legal principle, and not as a matter of course; a litigant who is merely dissatisfied with a decision must show more than dissatisfaction before the Court will interfere with the ordinary consequence that a judgment, once delivered, is to be obeyed and given effect. It is equally settled, and indeed elementary, that the mere lodging of a notice or memorandum of appeal does not, by itself, operate to suspend the authority, validity or enforceability of the judgment appealed from. A judgment of a competent court remains binding, valid and of full legal effect unless and until it is set aside on appeal, or its operation is expressly suspended by an order of stay properly obtained; the pendency of an appeal is not a self-executing suspension. Application of the Law to the Facts 18.The discretion to grant a stay or a conservatory order pending appeal is, at its core, an equitable and a judicial one. It exists to preserve the subject matter of an appeal so that, should the appeal succeed, the successful party is not left with an empty victory. It does not exist, and this Court is not prepared to allow it to be turned into an instrument, for sheltering an illegality, for perpetuating an unconstitutional or unlawful state of affairs, or for conferring even temporary legitimacy upon persons whose assumption of, or continuation in, office has already been judicially declared unlawful. To grant stay in such circumstances would be to press an equitable remedy into the service of an inequitable end, and no court exercising a discretion that is, by its very nature, equitable, can permit itself to be so used. 19.This brings the Court to what it considers the decisive difficulty confronting the Applicants. The Judgment sought to be stayed did not merely find against the Applicants on a disputed question of fact or law of the kind ordinarily left for the appellate court to resolve while the status quo is preserved in the interim. It found, after a full hearing and upon evaluation of the evidence placed before it, that the very elections from which the Applicants derive their claimed offices were a sham, and on that footing declared them null and void ab initio. A finding of nullity ab initio is not a finding that an otherwise valid act was later vitiated by some defect; it is a finding that the act in question never had legal existence at all, from its very inception. It follows, ineluctably, that the offices which the Applicants claim to hold, and which they now ask this Court to preserve by way of stay, are not offices lawfully held subject to a pending challenge; they are offices that, in the eye of the law as pronounced by this Court, were never lawfully assumed in the first place. There is, in a very real sense, nothing there for a stay to preserve. 20.It is important, for the avoidance of doubt, to elaborate on why this factor weighs so heavily against the grant of the orders sought. An order of stay operates upon a judgment or decree; it suspends, for a defined period and subject to conditions, the enforcement of what the court has ordered. It cannot, and does not, operate upon the underlying legal reality that the court's Judgment has authoritatively pronounced. Where a court has found an election to be a sham and declared it void ab initio, that finding does not itself depend on execution or enforcement for its legal effect; the nullity exists independently of whatever consequential orders the court makes to give it practical effect. A stay of the consequential orders, in such a case, would not restore the Applicants to a position of lawful incumbency, because no such position has existed since the Judgment was rendered; the offices remain, in law, vacant of any person validly elected to occupy them, regardless of what the Court's consequential orders say or do. To grant the stay sought would therefore not preserve a status quo; it would manufacture one, by clothing with the appearance of legitimacy an incumbency this Court has already found to be void. 21.Put differently, stay suspends enforcement; it does not, and cannot, breathe legal life into that which the Court has found never lawfully existed. The distinction is not a semantic one. It goes to the very purpose and utility of the remedy of stay pending appeal, which presupposes a valid judgment or order whose practical effect is, for good and sufficient reason, to be temporarily held in abeyance. That remedy was never intended, and this Court declines to extend it, to become a mechanism by which a declaration of nullity is, for all practical purposes, reversed at the interlocutory stage, in advance of, and without the benefit of, the very appellate determination the Applicants say they wish to pursue. 22.Turning to the question of substantial loss, which is in any event a mandatory and independent requirement under Order 42 Rule 6(2)(a) of the Civil Procedure Rules, the Court finds that the Applicants have not demonstrated, by evidence, any substantial loss that they stand to suffer should stay be refused. What the Applicants describe as loss is, in truth, no more than the prospect of ceasing to hold offices which this Court has already found they never lawfully held. A person cannot found a claim of substantial loss upon the anticipated loss of a position that was unlawfully or irregularly acquired; the law does not recognise, still less protect through the discretionary remedy of stay, an interest in the continued enjoyment of the fruits of an unlawful process. Nor can the ordinary inconvenience attendant upon complying with a lawful judgment, however unwelcome to the party bound by it, be elevated into the kind of injustice that the doctrine of substantial loss is designed to guard against. Were it otherwise, every unsuccessful litigant dissatisfied with an adverse judgment could transform mere inconvenience into substantial loss simply by asserting it, thereby defeating the very policy that judgments are to be obeyed and given effect pending appeal save in truly exceptional circumstances. 23.Even if some loss to the Applicants personally could be said to arise from implementation of the Judgment, and the Court does not so find, any such loss must be weighed in the scale against the considerably greater injury that would be visited upon the ordinary members of the Dock Workers Union were officials without a lawful mandate to be allowed, by order of this Court, to remain in office pending an appeal of uncertain duration. The membership of a trade union, and not any individual official or slate of officials, is the ultimate repository of the union's democratic life. To keep in place, by injunction, persons whose claim to office has already been found by this Court to rest on a sham election would be to prioritise the private interest of a handful of office-holders over the collective right of thousands of dock workers to be led by officials who hold a genuine and lawfully obtained mandate. On any fair balancing of interests, that scale tips decisively against the Applicants. 24.It follows, too, that a grant of stay in these circumstances would perpetuate an illegality that this Court has already identified and condemned. Trade union democracy, this Court must emphasise, belongs to the members of the union, and not to its officials. Officials hold office as trustees of a mandate conferred by the membership through a lawful electoral process; where that process has been found to be a sham, the officials who purport to derive authority from it hold no mandate capable of being preserved, and it would turn the constitutional and statutory scheme protecting freedom of association and internal union democracy on its head to use the machinery of this Court to shield such officials from the consequences of that finding. 25.Considerations of public interest reinforce this conclusion. The Dock Workers Union, as the record shows, represents thousands of workers in a sector of considerable economic significance to the country. The public interest in that sector, and in the wider integrity of trade union governance, lies firmly in the restoration of lawful, accountable and democratically legitimate leadership at the earliest opportunity, and not in the prolongation, through interlocutory relief, of uncertainty over who lawfully leads the Union. An electorate, whether of a nation or of a trade union, is entitled to know, without unnecessary or unjustified delay occasioned by litigation, who its lawfully elected representatives are: see, by analogy, Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission v Maina Kiai & 5 Others and Moses Masika Wetang'ula v Musikari Nazi Kombo & 2 Others. Public interest, on the facts of this case, weighs heavily against the grant of stay. 26.Having regard to all of the foregoing, the Court is satisfied that the balance of justice, on the totality of the material before it, favours implementation of the Judgment rather than its suspension. To grant the orders sought would be to create what can only be described as an artificial incumbency: an incumbency sustained not by any lawful electoral mandate, and not even by the ordinary presumption of regularity that attaches to office pending an appeal against a monetary or declaratory judgment of the ordinary kind, but by the bare fact of interlocutory litigation. This Court is not prepared to lend its authority to the creation of such an artificial state of affairs. 27.The Court has not overlooked the Applicants' further contention, raised by way of Supplementary Affidavits sworn on 30th June 2026 and 8th July 2026, that the Election Board designated under Order (iv) of the Judgment is not properly constituted, six of its nine members having allegedly been promoted out of the unionisable cadre, with a further member said to be under suspension. The Court makes no finding on the merits of that contention, noting only, in passing, that the Petitioners' response, drawing attention to Article 15(1)(e) of the Union's own Constitution, which expressly permits persons who are not members of the Union to be nominated to the Election Board, raises a serious question as to whether the premise of the Applicants' complaint is even factually sound. What the Court must decide, however, is not the merits of that dispute but whether it is properly raised, and properly determinable, in an application for stay of execution pending appeal. It is not. An application of this kind is concerned with whether the practical effect of a judgment should be held in abeyance pending an appeal against that judgment; it is not the appropriate vehicle for determining, on fresh affidavit evidence introduced after judgment, disputed questions going to the composition of a body the Judgment has designated to implement its orders. That is a matter of a different character altogether, going either to variation or review of the Judgment through the appropriate procedure, such as Rule 74(3) of the Employment and Labour Relations Court (Procedure) Rules, 2024, or to a fresh cause properly constituted and served on all persons with an interest in its outcome. The narrow jurisdiction this Court exercises in an application for stay does not extend to adjudicating such a dispute. The Applicant had, and it would appear has since availed himself of, a better avenue: the Court is aware that a fresh matter touching on the constitution of the Election Board has since been filed, and the same shall be mentioned before this Court on the date of delivery of this Ruling for appropriate directions. The Election Board issue is, for present purposes, left entirely open, to be canvassed in that other forum. 28.As to the arguability of the intended appeal, the Court accepts, without in any way pre-judging the outcome of that appeal, that the grounds identified by the Applicants, touching on the treatment of contested allegations of forgery on affidavit evidence, the burden of proof, and the interplay between the finding that no elections took place and the nullification of those elections, are not on their face frivolous, and may properly be said to raise arguable points within the meaning ascribed to that term in Stanley Kang'ethe Kinyanjui (supra). An arguable appeal, however, is only one of several conjunctive requirements for the grant of stay, and its presence does not, without more, entitle an applicant to the order sought. Here, for the reasons already given, the Applicants fail on the requirement of substantial loss, and fail also, and more decisively, on the wider equitable considerations discussed above. 29.The Applicants fare no better on the question of security. Order 42 Rule 6(2)(c) of the Civil Procedure Rules requires an applicant for stay to give such security for the due performance of the decree as the Court may order. Nothing in the Notice of Motion, the Supporting Affidavit, or the submissions filed on behalf of the Applicants offers, proposes or undertakes any security whatsoever, whether as to costs or otherwise. While this Court has, in appropriate cases, been prepared to cure such a deficiency by imposing terms as to security suo motu, it will only do so where the underlying application otherwise discloses a case meriting the exercise of the Court's discretion. Here, where the subject matter of the Judgment is not a monetary decree capable of being secured by a deposit but the lawful leadership and governance of a trade union, and where the Court has already found that the balance of equity lies firmly against the grant of stay, the omission to offer security is not a mere technical gap capable of being cured by conditions; it is one further indication that the Application does not meet the threshold the law demands. 30.Finally, the Court takes into account that the Judgment has, to a material extent, already been implemented. The 1st Respondent has, by its letter dated 23rd June 2026, cancelled the registration of the officials elected in the impugned elections and corrected the Register of Trade Unions, and the 1st Interested Party has issued a Circular to its membership convening fresh elections. What the Applicants in truth seek, at this stage, is not the preservation of a status quo but the reversal of steps already lawfully taken in compliance with the Judgment, in effect inviting this Court to restore them to a position already undone by operation of law. As was held in Oraro & Rachier Advocates v Co-operative Bank of Kenya Limited and in Equity Bank Limited v West Link MBO Limited, an order of stay is designed to arrest steps not yet taken; it is not ordinarily available to reverse what has already been lawfully completed. This consideration, too, weighs against the grant of the orders sought. Conclusion on the Merits 31.Having weighed all of the foregoing, the Court is satisfied that the Applicants have failed to meet the threshold, whether under Order 42 Rule 6 of the Civil Procedure Rules as applied through Rule 21 of the Employment and Labour Relations Court (Procedure) Rules, 2024, or under the wider equitable principles discussed above, for the grant of stay of execution, conservatory orders, or injunctive relief pending the hearing and determination of the intended appeal. The Notice of Motion dated 19th June 2026 must accordingly fail in its entirety. F. Disposition 32.For the reasons set out above, the Court makes the following orders:(a)The Notice of Motion dated 19th June 2026 be and is hereby dismissed in its entirety.(b)For the avoidance of doubt, the Judgment of this Court delivered on 17th June 2026, together with all consequential Orders made thereunder, including Orders (i) to (iv) thereof, remain in full force and effect and shall be given full and immediate effect by all persons bound thereby.(c)The costs of this Application shall be borne by the Applicants and awarded to the Petitioners.It is so ordered. DATED, SIGNED AND DELIVERED AT MOMBASA THIS 20TH DAY OF JULY 2026.OCHARO KEBIRAJUDGE