Author: TSA Press

When Zimbabwe’s president unveiled Kumbirai Hodzi as the country’s new Prosecutor General (PG) in January, it came as a surprise to many. This was because Hodzi had placed a distant sixth in the mandatory public interviews to choose a head of public prosecutions two months previously. This vacancy had arisen following the forced resignation of the previous head after only eight months in office.

But to those who have followed Zimbabwe’s recent judicial hiring, Hodzi’s appointment – which is now the subject of a court challenge – wasn’t completely unexpected, as it followed a predictable pattern in which those who score the highest marks in public interviews are simply disqualified from the running.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa has so far appointed eight judges, including a member of the ruling ZANU-PF party, from among a pool of borderline lawyers, including candidates that openly admitted they had never been in a court of law in their professional lives, or could not tell the difference between elementary court procedures such as a court application and a court action.

The same also applied when he appointed two judges to the Supreme Court in May last year. The candidates that came top in the public interviews were ignored as the promotions went to those that had performed dismally. For example, Justice Francis Bere, one of the judges promoted to the Supreme Court, had nearly half (43 percent) of his judgments set aside after being found to be unsound during Supreme Court appeal hearings. In comparison, one of the losers, Justice Nicholas Mathonsi, had handed down a record 333 judgments in three years, of which only 22 were appealed against with 21 upheld by the Supreme Court as correct while the remaining one was overturned on account of the judge’s harshness on a litigant whose papers were not in order.

A new Constitution, which came into effect in 2013, requires the Judicial Services Commission (JSC) to interview candidates for all senior judicial appointments publicly. The Constitution says the president can only take his pick from among the top three candidates, but in all these cases, Mnangagwa went out of his way to appoint those that had performed poorly.

Zimbabwe’s new leader, who is proving no better than Robert Mugabe, who he replaced, is not leaving anything to chance as he consolidates his stranglehold on power. He is seen to be packing the bench and other key judicial positions with his cronies while sidelining and or simply moving independent-minded judicial officers out of the way.

It is developments like these that resulted in the country’s lawyers staging a protest earlier this year to demand that the country returns to the rule of law. The lawyers strongly feel that judges only come to court to read decisions made elsewhere.

In mid-May prosecutors also went on strike protesting against what they see as an attack on their independence by the president, who has since set up a parallel special prosecution unit in his office.

Mnangagwa is a long-time former justice minister and most judicial officers were his subordinates until he became president in 2017. Aside from use of violence and brute force, there are more polished methods of controlling a country, and micromanaging the judiciary and all legal processes is certainly one of them. This is what Mnangagwa’s opponents see him doing.

The former PG, Ray Goba, resigned in August last year after a slew of allegations were raised against him, primarily his alleged failure to prosecute “high profile graft cases”. In reality, these cases exclusively involve members of a faction of the ruling ZANU-PF party that remained steadfastly loyal to Mugabe after he was toppled in the November 2007 coup.

For resisting playing a role in this persecution-by-prosecution campaign, Goba was suspended and an investigation into his continued suitability for the post was instituted. This resulted in him resigning.

Both Mnangagwa and current Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi, along with several other top officials, had been expelled from both the government and the ruling ZANU-PF party by the time Mugabe was toppled and are seen to have unfinished business with those that sided with Mugabe in his last days.

“He [Goba] refused to be used to settle scores with those that fell together with Mugabe, so for that, he was targeted and he saw that he could not stand, so he resigned,” a former judge told TRT World.

During the public interviews, Hodzi – who was Acting Prosecutor General – surprised the interviewing panel when he revealed that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which is already fully packed with officers seconded from the army, took orders from the executive on who to prosecute.

The setting up of a special anti-corruption unit in the president’s office has raised eyebrows within the legal fraternity.

Alex Magaisa, a UK-based law lecturer, says the move by Mnangagwa to set up an anti-crime department in his office is a clear violation of the constitution as it usurps the duties of the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) and the NPA.

“Having diagnosed the problem [of corruption], it is important for Mnangagwa to find the correct solution within the confines of the law. That solution must, therefore, be based on a solid legal foundation. It must be consistent with constitutionalism and the rule of law. It must not undermine the constitution and established constitutional principles and values,” Magaisa said.

He added that in the absence of specific legal authority, “it can be concluded that the special unit has been established by presidential decree, itself a hallmark of arbitrary rule”.

Veritas, a legal and legislative watchdog, also concluded that prosecutors were right in refusing to take orders from the unit in Mnangagwa’s office.

“It seems that the prosecutors are protesting against instructions being given to them by a Special Anti-Corruption Unit, not by the Prosecutor-General and his deputies in the NPA,” Veritas pointed in its weekly legal commentary.

“So if the Unit is a separate body independent of the NPA, then prosecutors can legitimately object to being given instructions by it ‒ indeed they ought to do so because the Constitution says they should take instructions only from the Prosecutor-General,” it added.

Mnangagwa, who for a long time headed a faction that was seen as preparing to take over power from an aged Mugabe, used his position as the country’s justice minister to fill up the judiciary with individuals loyal to him, even it meant they were not the best candidates.

“He personally interviewed most of the judges when he was still justice minister before recommending them to Mugabe for appointment to the bench, so most of them are very loyal to him since he personally invited them to the bench,” a senior lawyer that politely turned down one such invitation told TRT World. 

“Suggestions that Mnangagwa is a ‘legally illiterate lawyer’ are wrong. He is a very astute lawyer, who chooses to do the wrong things when it best suits him,” added the lawyer who requested anonymity for fear of victimisation.

Mnangagwa himself has in the past boasted about how he was the legal brain behind Mugabe’s 2008 comeback after an electoral defeat at the hands of the late opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

A few days before the new constitution came into effect in 2013, Mugabe – on the advice of Mnangagwa – hurriedly appointed six judges to the High Court and another one to the Supreme Court before the clause that require a cumbersome appointment process took effect. A few other loyalists were smuggled on to the bench in 2015 when Mugabe appointed nine judges under the new arrangement that requires the JSC to conduct public interviews for all senior judicial posts.

The appointment of a new Chief Justice in 2017 caused a huge legal uproarafter Mnangagwa unsuccessfully tried to push a candidate of his own choice, current Judge President (head of the High Court) George Chiweshe, to the pinnacle of the country’s judiciary.

The war veteran Judge President (Chiweshe) is a former military judge who continued to get promotions in the army even when he was serving in the judiciary. During the liberation war, in which most relationships were cemented, Chiweshe – under nom de guerre ’Yasser Arafat’ – deputised now Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, the general who led the coup that toppled Mugabe. The controversial judge presided over the 2008 elections fiasco, when he withheld presidential election results for a record five weeks after Mugabe had lost, until Mnangagwa had worked out a legal comeback route for the embattled ruler.

Chiweshe is also one of the two judges that passed judgements which served to sanitise the coup that toppled Mugabe. The other one was Justice Charles Hungwe, also a war veteran, who was the founding chairperson of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association in 1990.

After failing to get Chiweshe appointed Chief Justice, an unhappy Mnangagwa successfully pushed for a constitutional amendment to give the president powers to appoint a person of his choice to head the judiciary. The resulting amendment is being challenged before the Constitutional Court.

The amendment gives him power to handpick the Chief Justice, the Deputy Chief Justice and the Judge President when the current Chief Justice Luke Malaba reaches the fixed retirement age of 70 in 2021. This will be just in time for the 2023 elections.

Mnangagwa and his ZANU-PF appear to have carefully studied Justice Enjoined, a report published by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for Human Rights in 1992 on the sorry state of the judiciary in Kenya, and adopted – warts and all – the strategy of former president Daniel arap Moi and his KANU party in their final years in power. It was a strategy that gave Kenya a travesty of a judiciary, which existed primarily to serve the political and economic interests of the executive and the ruling elite.

Post published in: Featured

If the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was a ship it would be the Titanic, sailing with the patronage of a well-heeled elite with privileged access to the lifeboats towards a deadly iceberg.

The bank’s latest policy move – the return of the Zimbabwe dollar and the banning of the use of foreign currencies – amounts to re-arranging the deckchairs after the iceberg has opened up a wide gash in the ship’s hull.

Monetary loyalty – by force

Like the Titanic, the Reserve Bank is not unsinkable, whatever its political masters like to believe. Now they decree that Zimbabweans shall have but one currency: the reborn Zimbabwe dollar. Thou shalt not pay tribute to foreign monetary systems or at least don’t get caught. The US dollar, the South African rand and the euro are no longer legal tenders in Zimbabwe.

Anyone caught trading the born-again Zimbabwe dollar with foreign currencies will face the full weight of the law, the government says. Zimbabwe’s long-lost national money will become the sole legal tender again by force.

No belief in born-again dollar

There is a difficulty here. People have no confidence in the born-again money. In February, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube launched the Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) dollar, a surrogate currency based on electronic transfers to the Reserve Bank and its bond notes, both tied to an official exchange rate with the US dollar.

Last week the local dollars were trading for around half the official exchange rate.

But within days a parallel market emerged, selling the RTGS dollars at a deep discount to US dollars. Last week the official exchange rate was US$1=RTGS$6.2, but the local dollars were trading for around half that on the local market.

New dollars for old problems

What problems are the new dollars meant to solve? First, inflation, which is currently running at over 80%, its highest level for a decade; second, lack of control over interest rates and money supply; third, the lack of physical currency on the market.

This sounds confusing as in 2009 the finance minister, Patrick Chinamasa, announced that the use of the Zimbabwe dollar would be suspended as means to cure hyper-inflation, then running at 500 billion%. Chinamasa pronounced that the US dollar, the South African rand and some other convertible currencies would be legal tender in Zimbabwe.

Back to Biti’s basics

Then, under a new finance minister, Tendai Biti, now a luminary in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a new power-sharing government stabilised the economy.

But a new problem arose, the shortage of US dollars in the country. Followed by all the financial and commercial rigidities that dollarisation imposes on a small economy. In the short-term it helped the coalition – between the MDC and veteran ruling party Zanu-PF – establish a modicum of stability and begin to redress some of the structural problems in Zimbabwe’s economy and politics.

However, the short-term gains were quickly squandered, and with Zanu-PF’s victory in the 2013 elections, it reverted to type with massive opaque payments to the security services and ruling party functionaries and sweetheart deals for foreign mining companies willing to partner with local politicians.

Missing revenues a key failure

Hundreds of millions more were lost to the treasury. President Robert Mugabe admitted some US$15-billion in diamond revenues were unaccounted for. The deadly economic and financial crisis facing the country is government-made. But the government is using the wrong tools to fix it.

The deadly economic and financial crisis facing the country is government-made. But the government is using the wrong tools to fix it.

All the signs of implosion are there. A debilitating economic crisis, shortages of food, medicines, money, fuel, daily electricity blackouts lasting 20 hours, rocketing inflation and a crash in purchasing power.

Once the pride of Africa, Zimbabwe’s public education service is in tatters. A teacher now earns US$35 a month. Unconcerned, the political elite send their children to private schools overseas.

Corruption and bad policy = freefall

At the heart of the crisis is an economic meltdown triggered by politics. Zimbabwe’s economy ceased to be competitive many years back. Corruption and bad decisions are to blame.

• These include: an unplanned war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an unbudgeted splurge on war veterans (to compensate for grand looting of their compensation fund by ruling-party bigwigs) and much-needed but badly implemented land reform.

Missed chance for land reform

Land reform was chaotic and violent. It was also corrupt, with ruling party leaders grabbing multiple farms for themselves and their families. Agricultural production, a key driver of the country’s success, plummeted, as did manufacturing. Businesses fled or shut down in response to laws aimed at benefiting the ruling elite.

Predators at the wheel

The trouble with Zimbabwe is a predatory elite that prioritises personal accumulation over public interest and service. Comprised of top ruling party officials, their relatives and friends, this elite has a vested interest in the fuel economy. It controls and is the primary beneficiary of the minerals sector and the retailing businesses.

The same elite diverts public assets for private use, leaving little for services such as education, hospital supplies and medicines. It has manipulated the currency crisis to make money out of a system of arbitrage. It is accountable to no one, relying on coercion to protect its interests.

Skewed priorities

Ask the elite what the country’s problem is: “Western sanctions”, it answers. True, Western sanctions may deter foreign companies from Zimbabwe, but the plunder of public resources has nothing to do with sanctions.

The elite looks oblivious to the suffering of the people as it imports luxury vehicles, hires jets for presidential trips, spending millions on lobbying agencies in the US, sending its own members overseas for treatment while local hospitals lack the essentials.

Bottom line: This economic crisis is politically manufactured. It can’t be fixed by financial engineering and the return of a currency in which everyone lost faith. BM

Post published in: Business

A unique collaboration between two law schools and a private company has produced a tool designed to help low-income tenants avoid eviction and seek redress for unsafe living conditions.

The new tool, being unveiled today, is called Hello Landlord, and is designed to help tenants more effectively communicate with their landlords about issues that can lead to eviction.

It was developed largely by law students as part of a semester-long collaboration among the LawX Legal Design Lab at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, the Innovation for Justice program at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, and SixFifty, the tech subsidiary of the law firm Wilson Sonsini.

I have written several posts about BYU’s LawX, a program in which law students use design thinking to develop solutions to problems in access to justice. Last year, LawX released its first project, SoloSuit.

For the 2018-2019 academic year, as I reported here last August, LawX joined forces with Arizona’s newly launched Innovation for Justice program to explore ways to reduce evictions in their home states. Along the way, they also partnered with SixFifty, which is directed by Kimball D. Parker, who also directs the LawX program.

Yesterday, I spoke with Parker and Stacy Butler, who runs the Arizona program, to learn about what they developed.

Over the course of the semester, the students observed more than 220 eviction court proceedings and spoke with dozens of stakeholders, including judges, landlords, tenants, social services providers, attorneys and journalists.

By the time a tenant is served with an eviction notice, they concluded, the eviction process in both Arizona and Utah is too rapid and rigid to afford an opportunity to stabilize the rental housing at stake.

For that reason, they decided to focus on building a tool that would help tenants avoid court in the first place by helping them to better communicate with their landlords.

The tool they developed, Hello Landlord, is intended to help tenants with two types of problems — threat of eviction due to inability to pay rent and conditions in apartments requiring repairs or affecting habitability.

In either case, Hello Landlord leads the tenant through a series of guided questions and then generates a letter to the landlord that is designed to clearly explain the tenant’s situation and propose a solution.

The tool has both English- and Spanish-language versions, but the ultimate letter is always generated in English. The letter can be produced in either of two formats, Microsoft Word or PDF.

Butler and Parker say they and the students have interviewed a number of landlords in the process of creating this and found that 90 percent say they would be willing to work with a tenant to resolve a matter if they received a similar letter.

“We found that most landlords don’t want to evict tenants and are receptive to working with those who proactively reach out,” said Parker.

Although designed by students in Utah and Arizona, the tool can be used by tenants in any jurisdiction, Butler said. She noted that the application also includes a library of resources to help tenants understand their rights and the eviction process.

One challenge with a tool such as this is making it known to the tenants for whom it is designed. Parker and Butler say they plan a robust public relations campaign to help make tenants aware of it. They are also working with a number of social aid organizations, legal organizations and courts to help get the word out.

The application will be owned by SixFifty, which is committed to keeping it free forever, Parker told me. It was built on the same platform that SixFifty used to create its recently launched SixFifty Privacy, which I wrote about here.

Bottom Line

Hello Landlord is a simple tool with a specific purpose — help tenants create a letter to their landlords that could open a door to better communications and perhaps keep both parties from having to go through the courthouse door.

The challenge for Hello Landlord will be to reach the tenants who could use it, and also to reach them before their problem ends up in court. And, of course, even if a tenant finds the application and creates a letter, there is no guarantee it will achieve results.

That said, the tool appears to have the potential to keep at least some landlord-tenant disputes out of court. In and of itself, that is a laudable achievement.

It is also laudable that these two law schools are developing courses that encourage students to focus on access-to-justice issues and develop design-learning skills. This is training that benefits the students and that benefits the communities in which they live and will someday practice.

SixFifty also deserves recognition for contributing the money and resources to develop, host and support this product.

I asked Parker and Butler if the two law schools would be working together next year on another project. They will not, but both said they hoped to work together again at some point in the future.

From what we can tell, Chase Coleman III is like if codified wealth and privilege had a baby with old money Wall Street and then sent that baby to Deerfield and Williams where it played lacrosse and networked itself into a finance career.

Wait, sorry, that is actually Chase Coleman III.

Right, Bloomberg?

Born into New York aristocracy and educated at fine schools, Charles Payson “Chase” Coleman III was all of 25 when the hedge fund legend Julian Robertson handed him $25 million to start his own fund.

At 29, he married a chemicals heiress who’d been featured in the documentary “Born Rich.” A gifted athlete, he’s been known to catch a few waves in the morning near his $19 million Hamptons home before helicoptering to his Manhattan office. He’s surfed with world champion Kelly Slater, invested with Snoop Dogg in a cannabis company and he’s almost a scratch golfer.

Today, at 44, Coleman sits astride a $30 billion behemoth, Tiger Global Management. Bets on public and private technology companies have helped him amass a $4.6 billion fortune and made him the youngest financier among the world’s 500 richest people, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

This is a fun piece of profile writing that could also do double duty as the new intro to Bernie Sanders’s stump speech.

…Coleman, who grew up on the north shore of Long Island, the son of a lawyer and an interior designer. A descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, he attended Deerfield Academy, the elite boarding school in Massachusetts, and went on to co-captain the lacrosse team at Williams College.

“I’ve known Chase since he was a young boy on Long Island and a good friend of my son Spencer,” [Julian] Robertson said. So it was natural that his first hedge fund job was at Tiger Management.

We have never appreciated the use of the word “natural” more than we do in this context.

But before you populist Warrenista types get too wound up over meeting this human personification of the causes and effects of America’s growing wealth gap, just try to remember that every life holds some darkness:

Not everything’s perfect, though, of course. For one thing, the firm may actually have too much money—something Coleman himself addressed recently. 

“It’s not easy to manage a big pool of capital, and I’m challenged every day,” Coleman said last week at a Morgan Stanley conference, according to people who attended the event.

See? Coleman is less like a Bret Easton Ellis character comparing business cards while putting his victims’ body parts in the freezer,  and more like a John Cheever character on the verge of being emotionally broken by the crushing expectations of his station, about to be murdered in a pool by his bitter, pregnant mistress/secretary. Either way, he’s essentially a character of meta-fiction.

What we love most about this post is that the everyday Bloomberg reader will digest it and enjoy getting a peek into the life of a rather opaque bold-faced name in the hedge fund game who also happens to run one of the last brand name hedge funds. But if this story ever ends up in the hands of a HuffPost editor… stand back and behold the Millennial class war word bluster.

But this is where we need to step back and point out that Chase Coleman III appears to be a very good hedge fund manager:

In the early 2000s, Coleman and partner Scott Shleifer added private investments to the mix, realizing before many of their peers that they might find higher returns outside of public markets.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Coleman’s hedge fund lost 26%, followed by a paltry 1% gain the next year. The young investor regrouped, vowing to return to his tech roots and avoid industries where politics or macro events could interfere.

Investors say his success comes from concentrated bets, pressing winners and quickly cutting losers—skills he learned from Robertson. He told the Morgan Stanley crowd that the person who does best is the one with the panic button farthest from his keyboard.

And if you’re left debating “Is his talent a byproduct of his privileged upbringing and the relationships he has made living life in a manner that even the elite would see as elite?” our answer would be “It doesn’t really fucking matter if he returned 25 percent last year with assets under management hovering around $30 billion.”

This is finance, and asset management in paritcular is something of an outcome-based industry, making it hard for a shitty investor to be shitty and still hold assets in the low-to-mid eleven figures. Established relationships and inherited wealth are obviously huge factors in growing your future wealth and relationships, but Coleman’s success is a little too monstrous to be explained away via the prism of “The One Percent.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not like a Biglaw partner of lesser intellect thriving on the work of brilliant underlings (well, it totally is, but just go with the bit).

So we’ll just go ahead and reserve our impotent populist outrage for the next time some blue blood, born wealthy graduate of Exeter and (shudder) Middlebury who married a NYC real estate heiress loses his ass after bragging to CNBC about how he’s ingeniously shorting Amazon. Because, as much fun as it is to behold a living caricature like Chase Coleman III, it’s important to remember one key thing about caricatures like Chase Coleman III:

Coleman, who associates describe as reserved and a quintessential WASP, declined to comment for this article.

Exactly.

The Charmed Life of a Young Tiger Cub With a $4.6 Billion Fortune [Bloomberg]

When I was doing stuff in the rap world, it was eat what you kill. I learned how to hustle, and I learned to go out and get something for myself. It was very difficult. Any revenue I generated was a direct result of me doing it and me figuring it out. Sometimes you fall flat on your face when you’re learning how to do something, and sometimes you have success. I went through those processes. There were a lot of my classmates who were younger—I don’t want to say law school chewed them up and spit them out—but I saw some people have a change of heart or realize, “I don’t want to be in law school after all.” But for me, it confirmed that that life progression I had made was correct. It’s kind of a maturity thing.

— Roosh Williams, a recent graduate of the USC Gould School of Law, commenting on how his experience in the rap world helped him during law school. Prior to pursuing a legal education, Williams was a well-known rapper in Houston, Texas, and even cracked the Top 40 on the iTunes rap chart back in 2015. Williams plans to practice entertainment law after he passes the bar exam, and he already has a job lined up with a firm in Los Angeles.

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.