When Employees or Breakaway Shareholders Take Your Clients: The Legal Risks of Unlawful Competition in South African Business
It often unfolds without warning. A trusted senior manager resigns, citing a new opportunity. Within days, key staff begin handing in their notices. Shortly thereafter, long-standing clients start cancelling contracts or quietly shifting their business elsewhere. What initially appears to be an unfortunate coincidence soon reveals a more troubling pattern: a coordinated breakaway, with a competing business already in operation and actively targeting the very relationships built within the original company.
