Lewis, the furniture retailer-cum-microlender, is gunning for the man it holds responsible for its recent woes, Dave Woollam. Woollam, along with Clark Gardner, runs Summit Financial Partners, which is on a campaign against lenders that rip off the poor. In Lewis’s case, it began a year back, when Fin24 published gory details of Summit’s “mystery shopping trip” to a Lewis store in Howick, which appeared to show various breaches of the National Credit Act, including an assistant fiddling living expenses to ensure a customer got more credit.Largely thanks to Woollam, Lewis refunded R67.1m to customers who had been told to pay “unemployment insurance” even though they were unemployed or had been retrenched.It wasn’t the first time Lewis found itself in the dock over its lending practices, but it probably contributed to its 48% share price slide over the past year.But the latest development is more intriguing. A few weeks ago, Summit applied to have four Lewis directors — CEO Johan Ensl...
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