Raru faces liquidation

Online retailer Raru will soon be liquidated, News24 reports.

Raru cofounder Waine Smith reportedly said the company’s many creditors had forced the liquidation.

Smith referred questions about the liquidation to attorney Vaughan Ulyate, who said the liquidation application would be filed this week.

According to the report, Ulyate revealed Alchemy Trust as the major creditor. The trust is believed to represent one or more shareholders of Spoiler Tags (Pty) Ltd, the company trading as Raru.

A Masters Office search revealed five different trusts with “Alchemy” in the name. It is unclear to which Ulyate was referring.

Raru’s imminent liquidation comes after it halted all operations at the start of November, with a notice on its website stating that it was no longer taking orders.

That followed months of customer complaints that orders were not being delivered and refunds weren’t being processed on time.

The company also shut down its long-standing gaming-focused web forum SAGamer. It greets visitors with the message, “This site is unavailable.”

Following MyBroadband’s report about the customer complaints, Raru experienced an eight-hour outage on 24 October.

The downtime led to speculation that Raru had not paid its hosting bill or ran afoul of a takedown notice.

Several unhappy customers posted on complaints website Hello Peter that they had filed takedown requests with the Internet Service Providers’ Association of South Africa to try and force Raru to give them their money back.

When queried about the outage at the time, Smith told MyBroadband that their site had gone down at 09:00 and they were still waiting for a response from their hosting provider at 14:45.

Before they launched Raru, Waine Smith, Neil Smith, and Jose Pereira had cofounded Take 2 — the company that would eventually become Takealot.

They sold Take 2 to Tiger Global and Kim Reid in 2011, who rebranded the online store after the deal closed.

As part of the sale, the founders agreed to a restraint of trade that kept them out of South African ecommerce for three years.

However, they negotiated to exclude their online gaming community, SAGamer (originally PS3ZA), from the deal.

During their three-year gardening leave, they focused on growing SAGamer to give them a platform from which to launch Raru in 2014.

According to Companies and Intellectual Property Commission records, Pereira resigned as director on 10 June 2021.

News24 reported that Perreira remains a shareholder through a trust, although the trust’s name is currently unknown.

MyBroadband contacted Smith and Ulyate for comment, but they did not respond by the time of publication.

Now read: One Cyber Monday shopper in South Africa spent R200,000