Rejected former director threatens to sue Nominet

The person Nominet barred from standing in its non-executive director election this year says he was unfairly excluded and intends to sue.

Lawyer Jim Davies, who was a Nominet director over a decade ago and stood unsuccessfully last year, said on his blog that he has asked Nominet to suspend the election, slated for September.

“If they refuse, I will apply to court for an injunction,” he wrote.

Davies was one of five people nominated for the NED seat this year. Incumbent Phil Buckingham eventually pulled out of the race, and Nominet said Davies, who the company did not initially name, was denied candidacy for not completing a mandatory security screening, carried out by third-party consultant Reed, by the deadline.

“I have asked Nominet and Reed for disclosure of specific documents as a matter of urgency, in anticipation of making an application to court to obtain a declaration that I am a valid candidate in the 2023 NED election,” Davies wrote.

Nominet’s head of comms Will Guyatt has told members that there was a June 30 deadline to submit information for the screening, which he said Davies missed. He said Davies was reminded of the deadline June 28.

In a lengthy timeline, Davies says that he completed the screening application process June 28, and carried on talking to Reed about the screening as late as July 11, when he was told the screening had not found anything “adverse” to his candidacy.

Part of the problem seems to be that Reed wanted him to submit client invoices as part of the screening, and some of Davies’ clients don’t trust Nominet enough to reveal their relationship with him.

Guyatt told Nominet members that the board had agreed unanimously to exclude Davies’ bid on July 19 to be fair to all candidates.

It’s the second time in the last year that Davies has tried to get a Nominet election called off.

Last year, when he was a candidate, he started his WeightedVoting.uk campaign, which seeks to demonstrate that Nominet’s current voting system illegally breaks the company’s own rules. That election went ahead and was won by Kieren McMcarthy.

Davies was briefly a director of Nominet until 2009 when he quit during a lawsuit filed against him over his domain industry client base.

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