Author: TSA Press

The alert follows last week’s warning from a UN-appointed independent rights expert that the country – once seen as the breadbasket of Africa – is in the grip of “man-made starvation”.

In Geneva, WFP spokesperson Bettina Luescher said that almost $300 million was needed urgently to supply some 240,000 tonnes of aid.

“A climate disaster” and “economic meltdown” were to blame for the ongoing crisis, she explained, with normal rainfall recorded in just one of the last five growing seasons.

Subsistence farmers hit by unreliable rains

The increasingly unreliable rainy season affects subsistence farmers in particular as they grow maize – a very water-intensive crop, and many of these farmers are still recovering from the major 2014-16 El Nino-induced drought.

In addition, “the crisis is being exacerbated by a dire shortage of currency, runaway inflation, mounting unemployment, lack of fuel, prolonged power outages and large-scale livestock losses, and they inflict the urban population just as well as rural villagers,” Ms. Luescher said.

WFP has now nearly doubled aid assistance in a bid to reach more than four million of those hardest-hit by the crisis.

In total, however, 5.5 million people in the countryside and 2.2 million in urban areas need help, and acute malnutrition has risen to 3.6 per cent, up from 2.5 per cent last year.

‘Unprecendented’ malnutrition

Eight of Zimbabwe’s 59 districts have acute malnutrition rates of over five per cent, which is unprecedented, Ms. Luescher added.

Her comments echo last week’s warning from Hilal Elver, Special Rapporteur on the right to food, that women and children are bearing the brunt of the crisis.

The majority of youngster she had met on an 11-day official visit to Zimbabwe were stunted and underweight, she said.

Linked to this, child deaths from severe malnutrition have been rising in recent months, Ms. Elver added, and 90 per cent of Zimbabwean children aged six to 24 months are not consuming the minimum acceptable diet.

“I saw the ravaging effects of malnutrition on infants deprived of breastfeeding because of their own mothers’ lack of access to adequate food,” she explained.

Because of this, children were increasingly dropping out of school and being forced into early marriage; others faced domestic violence, prostitution, and sexual exploitation, the independent rights expert maintained.

The effects of the economic crisis were noticeable in rural areas and cities, including Harare, said the Special Rapporteur.

She described seeing people waiting for hours in front of gas stations, banks, and water dispensaries, and receiving information that public hospitals have been appealing to humanitarian organizations after their own medicine and food stocks were exhausted.

Ms. Elver called on the Zimbabwean Government, political parties, and the international community to come together to “put an end to this spiralling crisis before it morphs into a full-blown conflict”.

Post published in: Featured

Moved by the plight of the elderly residents at this home earlier this year, Zimnat decided to provide free insurance cover for the home’s two vehicles. Upon donating to the home, the organisation discovered that much more needed to be done to help the home overcome the many challenges it faces and ensure the residents are more comfortable.

It has therefore launched a charity drive dubbed the Heart to Hand Christmas Campaign to enlist the help of customers and members of the public in helping improve the lives of the home’s elderly residents.

The Heart to Hand Christmas Campaign is an appeal to well-wishers to donate goods that will be channelled towards the upkeep of the residents.

Located along Mutare Road, Melfort Old People’s Home, which is registered with Help Age, has the capacity to accommodate 60 elderly residents, most of whom have been referred to it by the social welfare department. Some have come from Harare and Marondera hospitals.

Among the challenges, the home faces are the lack of consistent food supply and inadequate manpower. Currently, there are only two superintendents, who are employed by Help Age Zimbabwe, and a part‑time nurse.

“After our earlier contribution to Melfort Old People’s Home in May this year, we saw that there was more that needed to be done to ensure that our elders, who are a fountain of wisdom, have a comfortable life,” Zimnat group chief executive officer Mustafa Sachak said.

“We discovered that there are a lot of challenges the home is facing, such as food shortages and lack of manpower. We decided, therefore, to launch a Christmas Campaign called Heart to Hand which is targeted at encouraging members of society and corporate citizens to contribute whatever they can towards the Old People’s home” he said.

Zimnat has placed Heart to Hand donation collection bins at the entrance all of its branches, in which those wishing to take part in the Heart to Hand Christmas Campaign can place their donations.

Commenting on the launch of this year’s Heart to Hand campaign, Zimnat Group Marketing and Public relations director Angela Mpala said: “I do hope that members of the public and corporates will join us in our effort to improve the lives of the elderly residents of Melfort Old People’s Home. They really do deserve our assistance.”

Zimnat is a diversified financial group that offers products across the financial and insurance spectrum. It has four business units, namely Zimnat General Insurance, Zimnat Life Assurance, Zimnat Financial Services and Zimnat Asset Management.

Post published in: Featured

Robert Mugabe left $10m (£7.7m) in the bank, some small plots of land and a handful of modest properties, a list of his estate published by a state-owned newspaper in Zimbabwe has shown.

The report of the relatively limited fortune of the late dictator, published on Tuesday, was greeted with scepticism by many in the poverty-hit southern African country.

Mugabe, who died in August aged 95, was thought to have amassed a portfolio of investments worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, over his near four-decade rule.

The most recent list was revealed when Mugabe’s daughter Bona Chikowore wrote to legal officials seeking to register her father’s estate, which she said included $10m held in a local bank, four houses in the capital, Harare, 10 cars, a farm, his rural home and an orchard, the Herald newspaper reported.

No will has yet been found and there has been no other declaration of Mugabe’s wealth, or that of his second wife, Grace, nor of his sons and other relatives.

The former guerrilla leader, who took power in 1980 and ruled for decades, was buried in September in his rural home town of Kutama.

The final burial place caused tension between the government, which wanted him to be interred at the National Heroes Acre, a hilltop shrine in Harare, and his family.

When he was ousted from power in November 2017, Mugabe was given a generous state pension and a retirement package that included a pension, housing, holiday and transport allowance, health insurance, limited air travel and security.

Some of the Mugabe family wealth has been exposed by a series of legal quarrels. One, between Grace Mugabe and a Belgian-based businessman over a $1.3m diamond ring, lifted a veil on the lifestyle of his widow, nicknamed “Gucci Grace” for her reputed dedication to shopping. The family is believed to have an extensive portfolio of luxury homes overseas. In 2015, a dispute revealed their ownership of a $7.6m home in Hong Kong.

The ruling Zanu-PF party said in October it planned to transfer ownership of the sprawling mansion in Harare where Mugabe lived until shortly before his death to the family. The house is worth several million dollars.

The Mugabes are also thought to own more than a dozen farms. Several are in Mazowe, about 40km (25 miles) north of Harare. One, belonging to Grace Mugabe, has been the centre of a recent land dispute.

A 2001 US diplomatic cable, later released by WikiLeaks, said that while reliable information was difficult to find, there were rumours that Mugabe’s assets “include everything from secret accounts in Switzerland, the Channel Islands and the Bahamas to castles in Scotland”.

The news of the Mugabes’ wealth comes as Zimbabwe plunges further into a humanitarian crisis. The UN food agency said on Tuesday it was procuring 240,000 tonnes of food assistance to deliver to 4.1 million people in the former British colony where food shortages are being exacerbated by runaway inflation and drought induced by climate change.

“We are very much concerned as the situation continues to deteriorate,” Eddie Rowe, World Food Programme country director, speaking from Harare, told a news briefing in Geneva.

The country, once the breadbasket of Africa, is experiencing its worst economic crisis in a decade, marked by soaring inflation and shortages of food, fuel, medicines and electricity. The aid will be for January to June, Rowe said.

Post published in: Featured

The new outfit, which will be trading as ZFX Bureau de Change, is a registered Tier Two bureau de change, which is able to provide both foreign exchange and money transfer services.

ZFX will, according to Zimnat group chief executive officer Mustafa Sachak, combine customer-tailored financial services and technology to bring convenience to its customers.

“As a business that is guided by a purpose of making life better, we are driven to always come up with financial solutions that empower all our stakeholders to reach their full potential.

“The idea of coming up with ZFX was born out of the need to ensure we provide a holistic financial service for our customers. In that vein we have also partnered with World Remit to ensure that our customers can also receive money from their benefactors in the diaspora and be able to change it under one roof,” said Mr Sachak.

He said Zimnat hoped that ZFX would strengthen foreign currency availability on the interbank market by providing competitive exchange rates.

“This bureau de change has also been born out of the need to provide a safe, legal and convenient place for changing one’s money and leveraging on our widespread distribution network. We hope to provide this convenience in all four corners of the country,” said Mr Sachak.

The new bureau de change allows customers to convert their foreign currencies, including United States dollars, British pounds, South African rands and Botswana pula, at competitive market rates.

Zimnat is a diversified financial services group made up of four business units, namely Zimnat General Insurance, Zimnat Life Assurance, Zimnat Microfinance and Zimnat Asset Management. It is associated with Sanlam, which is the largest non-banking financial services group on the continent.

Post published in: Business

According to data collected by NALP, what was the overall employment rate for the Class of 2018, 10 months after graduation?

Hint: Though the total number of jobs was down slightly, the overall percentage was up, driven, in part, by fewer law graduates competing for those jobs.

See the answer on the next page.

Disclaimer: This episode was originally aired on October 16, 2018.

Joe and Elie take a serious turn, talking to University of Cincinnati Law Professor Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project, and author of Blind Injustice about the scourge of wrongful convictions, prosecutorial misconduct, and the trouble with local elections. Professor Godsey, a former prosecutor himself, discusses his conversion to an advocate for the wrongfully convicted and his grasp of the psychology that consistently lands the wrong people in prison. Speaking of psychology, Elie discusses whatever’s going on in Kanye’s head.

Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

The $100 million gender discrimination case against Morrison & Foerster has been pared down. As you may recall, a total of seven plaintiffs have come forward alleging there’s a “mommy track” at the firm that hurt their career advancement after they took maternity leave. Now comes word that five of the seven plaintiffs have reached a settlement with the firm, after a September mediation session.

According to a joint case management statement filed with the court on November 27th, the claims of Jane Does 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 against MoFo have been resolved. According to reporting by Law.com, neither side of the dispute would offer further comment on the particulars of the settlement.

For the remaining plaintiffs, Jane Doe 1, a former MoFo associate in a California office, and Jane Doe 6, of counsel in the firm’s New York office, a  new amended complaint is expected soon. According to the joint statement, plaintiffs will file their amended complaint December 10th, where the pseudonyms of the remaining name plaintiffs will be lifted. The filing also indicates “further discovery is necessary to negotiate a resolution, if any, to the claims of Jane Does 1 and 6.” Something we’ll be sure to track closely.

Earlier: MoFo ‘Mommy Track’ Lawsuit Heats Up Over Discovery Dispute
MoFo Scores Partial Victory In ‘Mommy Track’ Gender Discrimination Lawsuit
MoFo’s Attempt To Play Hard Ball With Gender Discrimination Plaintiff Fails
MoFo Files For Sanctions Against Firm, Plaintiff Suing Them For Gender Discrimination
Pregnancy Discrimination Lawsuit Against MoFo Spirals And Gets Yet Another Plaintiff
MoFo Responds To Explosive Pregnancy Discrimination Lawsuit
More Plaintiffs Added To Astonishing Pregnancy And Gender Discrimination Case Against MoFo
MoFo Hit With $100 Million Pregnancy Discrimination Lawsuit

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

I was blessed that someone messed up in the admissions office at Yale Law School a quarter century ago and that they let me in and even let me stay for three years. But I entered a very different world than not only the one I’d grown up in, in Brooklyn and on Staten Island, but also from where I had been also blessed to work for the two years before. I had been a paralegal in the Rackets Bureau in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and at a time when New York was awash in crime.

I started as a paralegal in just about the peak year for homicides in New York’s entire history. I got to “second seat” (sit besides the lawyer trying the case, and hopefully help out) for a few trials, seeing voir dire several times and seeing a few juries resolve extremely involved criminal schemes through to unanimous verdicts.

However, when I started in law school I heard — a lot — how juries just do not understand; we need “blue ribbon” grand juries or trial juries to decide cases; issues are just too complex today for regular people — what we called them where I grew up — to decide sophisticated, and, at times, confusing disputes. Indeed, I recently attended a conference regarding patent litigation at a law school where a professor just oozed with contempt for juries and mocked even the idea that a jury of our peers could resolve an intricate and involved intellectual property dispute.

That all may make us super-smart lawyers feel better, that we can determine “involved” and “sophisticated” and “confusing” and “intricate” cases, unlike the regular people on juries who cannot.

But that’s wrong.

The current debased state of political discourse may make us question our system, and specific features of our legal heritage devised by the Founders — the Second Amendment (at least as understood by some) and the Electoral College, as two examples — are particularly criticized. But the jury system that we took from our English forebears and that we developed even more than they did (they barely have it anymore) works, and works fine, provided we actually get the case before the jury (an issue that a much more established trial lawyer than I has complained about and is trying to do something about).

The problem isn’t with the juries. The problem is with those “trial lawyers” and their criticism, perhaps coming up with an excuse as to why they never try their cases. It’s not because they’re afraid of trial (no, it’s not that; promise), but, they protest, because the jury “just won’t get it,” so we need to resolve, either as defendant or plaintiff, on terms which don’t make sense to us, and not accept the risk that should be part of a trial lawyer’s life.

I’ve had further good blessings in the law since that admissions officer let me into law school. Among the greatest is having tried many dozens of trials —  before juries, judges, and arbitrators, on behalf of plaintiffs and defendants, in New York, around the country, and in international fora. I’ve consistently found that if the trial lawyer does her job, the jury will do their job, and do it well. Get your own trial experience and, I hope, you will have the same view.

A case in point for me is a recent eight-year international private equity dispute our firm handled. When we took over the case from another firm (Ivy League notes all over the place in their bios, not many references to how many trials they had) our clients were facing well over $800 million liability with suits against them in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, India, and even Mauritius.

Years later, after we defeated a well-resourced adversary eight times in courts in four nations, all liability against our clients was gone. And, just last month, I had the privilege of presenting our case — now only as plaintiffs — to a state court jury. We had to present more than a decade of history and hundreds of pages of documents to the jury, over three weeks of jury selection and trial. I’m sure it wasn’t thrilling at all times, but my colleagues and I did our best to make some ruthless choices regarding what to present (and not), what cross to use, on which witness, which documents to emphasize, and so forth. In the end, we obtained for our clients an eight-digit jury award, representing a nearly $900 million swing in value since we were hired.

My colleagues did a phenomenal job, and they deserve credit (as does the judge who, another blessing, was a real trial judge, always trying to do what he thought was fair). But the jury deserves credit, too — they deliberated for days, over a weekend. The verdict they eventually rendered showed real consideration. Indeed, during deliberations my adversary and I shared how blessed we felt to be part of a system where regular people gave up their time to consider so carefully something that it seemed had nothing to do with them. Of course, we joked, we hoped that they carefully found a result in our favor; but, win or lose, we honestly noted that we thought they were dutiful.

Juries work. Before we complain that they don’t, let’s actually try some more cases to juries or even judges, or at least conduct hearings before arbitrators (who, like juries and judges presented with complicated disputes, also do their best to get it right). And let’s put the blame on winning or losing where it belongs: on ourselves and our colleagues.

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John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.