ReportsNG
The Commonwealth Local Government Forum is a London-based membership body that brings together mayors, ministers and local government leaders from across the Commonwealth. Its board has carried ministers from small island states and mayors from great cities. For twenty-two months, one of its directors was a sitting mayor himself, the executive mayor of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa.
The filings name him as Amos Nkoseyakhe MASONDO. The middle name is the full name of the South African politician: Nkoseyakhe Amos Masondo, born 27 April 1953, executive mayor of Johannesburg from 2000 to 2011 and later chairperson of the National Council of Provinces from 2019 to 2024. Companies House records the officer’s birth as April 1953, his nationality as South African and his occupation, in the filing’s own word, as Mayor. The appointment is dated 15 May 2009. The resignation is dated 31 March 2011. Both dates fall inside his Johannesburg mayoralty.
The company is the Commonwealth Local Government Forum, company number 02962250, a private company limited by guarantee without share capital, still active on the British register. It was incorporated on 25 August 1994. Its registered office is Golden Cross House, 8 Duncannon Street, London WC2N 4JF. Its filed business descriptions are membership organisations and the activities of extraterritorial organisations and bodies. The correspondence address Masondo gave on the filing is Craven House, 16a Northumberland Avenue, London WC2N 5AP, a London address consistent with the forum’s London base.
The forum’s own publications place him in its world at the time. During his mayoralty, Masondo appears in Commonwealth local government gatherings as a participating mayor and as the president of the South African Local Government Association. No publication, profile or news report has carried the formal part: that he sat on the forum’s London board as a registered director for twenty-two months. The filings examined by ReportsNG are the only public trace of the seat.
South African law sets out what a directorship means for a man in that office. The Code of Conduct for Councillors, Schedule 1 of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act of 2000, provides in item 7 that a councillor must, within 60 days of election or appointment, declare in writing to the municipal manager the financial interests he holds. The list that follows names directorships expressly, alongside shares, trusts, partnerships and property. The Code does not make the seat itself unlawful. It makes the seat a declarable interest.
Item 7(4) of the Code leaves it to the municipal council to determine which declared interests are made public, weighing confidentiality against the public interest in disclosure. A declaration made to a municipal manager in Johannesburg in 2009 would not, under this scheme, necessarily ever surface in public. The filings do not record whether the directorship was declared in Johannesburg. They do not record what the forum’s board paid, what it decided in those twenty-two months, or what Masondo did in the seat.
What the filings establish is a matter of record. For twenty-two months, while he ran Johannesburg, Amos Masondo held a registered directorship in London, with his full name, matching birth month and year, nationality and occupation all on the filing. The seat stood on the British register throughout that period.
