Author: TSA Press

Phelekezela Mphoko was co-vice-president with Emmerson Mnangagwa under Robert Mugabe

Mr Mphoko was due at a police station to make a statement on allegations being levelled against him but drove away when his car was approached by the officials, AFP news agency reports.

His lawyer said Mr Mphoko feared being detained and poisoned.

He also denied he was on the run, calling the phrase “sensationalist”.

Mr Mphoko was a co-vice-president under Robert Mugabe.

He served alongside current President Emmerson Mnangagwa when Mr Mugabe was ousted by the military in November 2017, but the two have fallen out.

‘Poison fears’

Mr Mphoko was part of a faction that wanted Mr Mugabe’s wife, Grace, to succeed him rather than Mr Mnangagwa, South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper reports.

The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) wants to talk to him about alleged abuse of office.

Mr Mphoko’s lawyer, Zibusiso Ncube, told AFP that his client was willing to answer questions, but left when he heard the police “had instructions to detain him”.

Mr Ncube told the BBC’s Shingai Nyoka that his client feared for his life and was concerned that he would be “injected with a poison”.

‘Not a fugitive’

The former vice-president is prepared to stand trial and denies claims he abused his office after allegedly storming a police station demanding the release of an official, Mr Ncube said.

Mr Mphoko “is not a fugitive, and he hasn’t been charged with anything”, he added.

“He would never run away. The allegations are sensationalist.”

Earlier this month, the president fired Tourism Minister Prisca Mupfumira “for conduct inappropriate for a minister of government” after her arrest over the disappearance of millions of dollars from the country’s pension fund.

ZACC alleges the money went missing during her time as minister of labour and social welfare. Ms Mupfumira denies the allegations.

Post published in: Featured

HARARE – Zimbabwe police deployed in force in the city of Gweru on Tuesday, witnesses said, as authorities sought to keep a lid on dissent after banning the third anti-government protest that the main opposition party has sought to organise inside five days.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) planned rolling mass demonstrations in different cities starting last Friday. It accuses President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government of mishandling the economy, which is facing its worst crisis in a decade, and repression.

The MDC said it would challenge the ban in court on Tuesday. The party failed to overturn two previous bans on marches in Harare and Bulawayo.

In Gweru, a central city, police patrolled on foot and in lorries and also cordoned off a university, a local journalist told Reuters.

“There is a determined effort by the regime to ensure that there is no more democratic space,” MDC national spokesman Daniel Molokele said.

“They are also deploying a lot of military and police in the streets… It clearly shows that the new government is even worse than that of Robert Mugabe.”

The demonstrations are viewed as a test of Mnangagwa’s willingness to tolerate dissent in a country tainted by a long history of repression under his predecessor Mugabe.

But authorities are jittery following violent fuel protests in January that triggered an army crackdown that killed more than a dozen people.

The MDC is perturbed by the statement on Zimbabwe in the 36-paragraph SADC Communique issued Sunday following the regional body’s 39th summit of Heads of State and Government that ran from 17 to 18 August 2019 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The SADC Communique is gravely concerning not just about what it said but also about what it did not say about Zimbabwe.

On paragraph 14 of their Communique, SADC leaders report that “Summit noted the adverse impact on the economy of Zimbabwe and expressed solidarity with Zimbabwe and called for the immediate lifting of the sanctions to facilitate socio-economic recovery in the country”.

Other than paragraph 6 of the Communique that congratulates “Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe as Chairperson of the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation”, nothing else is said about Zimbabwe.

It is disconcerting that SADC could congratulate Mr Mnangagwa as the new head of the regional body’s organ on Defence and security at a time when Zimbabweans are suffering insecurity and defenselessness from the regime in power in Harare.

While SADC leaders are well within their rights to pronounce themselves on the sanctions issue, it is disappointing that they have a frozen and opportunistic narrative on the matter. There’s no difference between what they have been saying since 2001 and what they said yesterday, like a record stuck in a groove.

For SADC leaders, it is enough to make the news headlines by “expressing solidarity with Zimbabwe” and “calling for the immediate lifting of the sanctions to facilitate socio-economic recovery in the country”.  This 18-year old stock-narrative no longer has an audience besides the SADC leaders themselves.

On sanctions, SADC leaders must speak through actions, not through convenient but hollow words for the media. Contextualizing sanctions over a year ago, on January 2018, Mnangagwa himself said, “Yes, sanctions are there, but we should not continue talking about them. We must have solutions and already we have solutions in agriculture, and this should cascade to all sectors”.

Given Mnangagwa’s position, SADC’s call “for the immediate lifting of the sanctions to facilitate socio-economic recovery in the country” is odd and out of step with the reality in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabweans have come to know that when SADC leaders want to ignore or distort the tricky crisis of illegitimacy in Zimbabwe, they wax lyrical about sanctions and express “solidarity with Zimbabwe”, while saying and doing nothing about the worsening plight of Zimbabweans.

Yet there can be no Zimbabwe without Zimbabweans.

Before its 38th summit in August 2018, SADC was confronted by military and police atrocities committed in Harare on 1 August 2018, in which six Zimbabweans were killed in cold blood and 35 others were critically injured by the Army and the Police. This was confirmed by the Kgalema

Motlanthe Commission, an international body whose appointment SADC supported.

It is incredulous that the 2019 SADC summit was dead silent about the findings of the Motlanthe Commission and the failure and the unwillingness, by Mnangagwa’s administration to hold to account the army and police officers who killed six and injured 35 Zimbabweans on 1 August 2018.

Even worse, between 14 to 28 January 2019, at least 17 Zimbabweans were killed, hundreds tortured, some raped, by elements in the army, police, CIO and Zanu PF militia with thousands were displaced internally and externally in an unprecedented orgy of State violence that affected all major cities across Zimbabwe.

As in the case of the atrocities committed on 1 August 2018, in fact worse than in that case, no process of enquiry has been undertaken; and the State culprits are once again getting away scot-free with impunity.

The January 2019 scenario was another major clampdown on citizens and was carried out resulting in 17 extra-judicial killings, 17 cases of rape and other violations of a sexual nature, 26 abductions, 61 displacements, 81 assaults consistent with gunshot attacks, at least 586 assaults, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment (including dog bites), and 954 arrests and detention (including dragnet detentions). Further, a record-breaking 22 MDC and Civil Society leaders including parliamentarians and labor leaders face trumped-up charges of treason and subversion.

On 16 July 2019, labor leaders received anonymous letters with bullets in a clear move meant to intimidate the labor movement against exercising their right to peacefully demonstrate and petition. Where is SADC’s responsibility to protect?  When will SADC, just for once, stand with the people of Zimbabwe and express solidarity not with Zimbabwe but with Zimbabweans?

Yes. Zimbabweans have had enough of a SADC that is always congratulating the President of Zimbabwe and expressing solidarity with the State but never addressing itself to the plight of the ordinary people brutalized by the State.

As SADC leaders were meeting in Dar es Salaam over the weekend, Zimbabwean State agents were busy abducting civil society and political activists; while the police and army were issuing illegal prohibition orders like confetti to deny citizens from holding peaceful demonstrations against the worsening economic hardships induced not by sanctions but by unprecedented corruption through rent-seeking schemes like command agriculture, fuel cartels and abuse of treasury bills by the ruling elite.

On the back of Zimbabwe’s crisis of illegitimacy, these hardships induced by corruption coupled with incompetence are causing multitudes of Zimbabweans to cross the borders into neighbouring SADC countries, notably but not only South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia. The consequences of the emigration influx on regional economies are too ghastly to contemplate, yet SADC leaders continue to bury their heads in the sand like ostriches, only to raise the heads when they want to pontificate about 18-year old sanctions while doing nothing about them in real economic terms.

The MDC reiterates that the root cause of Zimbabwe’s problems is political, being a crisis of governance. A legitimacy crisis.

The July 2018 elections further entrenched the legitimacy crisis through a fundamentally flawed electoral process that did not guarantee the will of the people.  The 2018 plebiscite did not conform to the provisions of the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections and the African Union (AU) Declaration on the Principles Governing Democratic Elections.

The electoral process was marred by irregularities including a highly partisan and captured Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, lack of transparency in the electoral process including on the printing and storage of ballot papers and poor stakeholder engagement by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, a party-state-military complex, partisan conduct of traditional leaders, partisan distribution of food aid, widespread Intimidation, abuse of State resources, biased State media,  an Electoral Law that is not aligned to the Constitution of Zimbabwe including the disfranchisement of diasporans and post-election violence. Such a flawed electoral process perpetuated the legitimacy crisis and is manifesting in the current socio-economic crisis, deteriorating human rights situation and lethargy.

Moreover, there was an outright fudging of the figures as demonstrated by the fact that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission revised downwards its own figures a record three times in a plebiscite SADC still held as credible.

The MDC urges SADC to urgently take note of the worsening situation in Zimbabwe as a threat to peace and security in the region and to recognize its responsibility to protect. We urge SADC to take the following specific actions:

1. Urgently be seized of the matter of Zimbabwe in order to address the multifaceted crisis and prevent further deterioration of the situation.

2. Urgently find a lasting solution to the Zimbabwean crisis anchored on facilitated and credible national dialogue.

MDC Communications

ELIZABETH WARREN RELEASED HER CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM PLAN: Bernie Sanders released his this past weekend. Let’s discuss.

LAWYER TOLD CLIENTS IT WAS OKAY TO GROW POT: Narrator: It was not okay.

GENERAL COUNSEL WHO WAS ALLEGEDLY GROPED WANTS A CONVICTION: Not a plea deal.

JEFFREY EPSTEIN JAIL BED WILL: Estate planning!

SUPREME COURT CLINIC: U.T. Law offers one.

As we prepare to enter another football season, Elie and Joe discuss some high-profile sports law stories making the rounds and focus on the most important intellectual property question that you would have thought was too dumb to ask: Can you trademark the word “the”?

The name partner of what Biglaw firm, founded in 1961, graduated from Yale Law School in 1941 alongside classmates, and future Supreme Court justices, Byron White and Potter Stewart?

Hint: The firm has made its name focusing on representation of technology companies and venture capitalists.

See the answer on the next page.

A distinct feature of this current presidency is an embrace of one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite known political tactics called whataboutism. For Putin and this president, whataboutism can be described as responding to any criticism by pointing out that somebody else, sometimes decades ago such as when Bill Clinton was president, did something bad too once. Unfortunately for the country, this president of the United States has engaged in a lot of racist statements and associations that no whatabout should ever be able to obfuscate.

Birtherism was/is a disgusting, racist concept that no one, and not a shred of evidence, suggested this president should champion. No whatabout morally alters the fact that this president purposefully misrepresented the nature of what was rather obviously headlined and carried out as a white supremacist rally. Neither should anyone else’s bad deed matter to the fact that this president referred to the obvious white supremacists attending the rally as being “very fine people.” More recently, but no less obviously, the president’s textbook racism was on display yet again in the form of telling four members of Congress, all of whom are American citizens — though I am not quite sure that even matters at this point — to “go back” to where they came from.

As Adam Serwer, staff writer at the Atlantic, correctly pointed out at the time the “go back” statements were made, the importance of condemning the president’s racism does not require any personal affection towards the particular members of Congress the president was referring to. That is because condemning the president’s racist tropes should be about “defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people [emphasis mine]” not just someone in particular. For my part however, I purposefully took the time to differentiate the president from at least one of the members of Congress he used racist tropes against: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

To be clear, I did accuse both the president and Representative Omar of making racist tropes in the past. Nevertheless, I made the decision to distinguish Omar from the president by accurately stating that only “Congresswoman Omar has apologized for or admitted ignorance to such ‘tropes,’ and thereafter consistently publicly denounced the racism attributed to the trope.” In just the last week however, it has become clear that the recent actions and associations of Congresswoman Omar need to be addressed independently from the actions of anyone else, including this president.

Last week, it was revealed that not only did Congresswoman Omar and a fellow member of Congress, Rashinda Tlaib, fail to take part in a large bipartisan delegation to Israel (a largely innocuous decision by itself), the two members of Congress decided instead “to go on an independent trip to Israel sponsored by vicious anti-Semites.” By any acceptable measure, the fact that two members of Congress refused a Congressional trip in favor of the company of an anti-Semitic group represents a crying scandal in American politics. Moreover, when it comes to Congresswoman Omar especially, the fact that she has used anti-Semitic tropes in the past coupled now with associations to clear anti-Semitic organizations means that past apologies and claims of ignorance have begun to carry little to no weight. Given that its members of Congress are partnering with organizations that celebrate suicide bombers and sharing arguably racist tropes certainly authored by bigots, the Democratic Party leadership must be viewed under some kind of obligation to address this scandal.

But as New York Times columnist Bari Weiss right points out, complicating everything is the fact that the president has made racist remarks directly against Congresswoman Omar. It therefore likely remains a question whether the left, specifically the Democratic Party leadership, will confront the obvious scandal relating to Congressmembers Omar and Tlaib or instead choose to obfuscate the issue by using the president’s racism as a whatabout.

What is more troubling is that the need to confront anti-Semitism is not just a problem for the American left. Across the Atlantic in Great Britain, prominent liberals have for years been struggling to address institutionalized anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. There is simply no justifiable explanation to explain why the state of Israel should ever be condemned in a single year at the U.N. more than the regimes of Syria, North Korea, Iran, and South Sudan combined. Neither does it make any logical sense that Israel is the subject of a nationwide boycott movement here in the United States while objectively worse places (and places that have greater economic ties to the United States), such as China and Saudi Arabia get a pass.

It is past the time where the attempt to obfuscate immoral transgressions by using someone else’s bad behavior gets labeled as the childish tactic that it is. We can do better than this. The president’s statements in support of and association with white supremacy and the anti-Semitism on the left need to be condemned independently of one another whenever they occur. Unfortunately the American right, other than a few virtuous exceptions, have refused to break with their dear leader, despite years of furthering racist beliefs such as birtherism. With the primaries still ahead, the American left is presented with an important choice not to engage in the same whatabout obfuscation in the future.

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Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.

A last will and testament has been filed in the U.S. Virgin Islands for disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died last week as a result of an apparent suicide.  The last will and testament was executed in the Metropolitan Corrections Center in New York, New York, two days prior to his passing. The proximity of the last will and testament signing to his death has some suggesting that he feared his death at the hands of others, or that he was planning a suicide. Either scenario reveals that in his final days, incarcerated, a priority for him was getting his affairs in order and consulting with his own legal counsel.

One may think that estate planning is not an inmate’s preeminent legal concern, especially an inmate with as serious charges as Epstein’s. Jail and prison, however, are dangerous places, especially for high-profile inmates. Given the gravity of the alleged crimes and Epstein’s well-known history, many feel that he was a target and death, including suicide, was not out of the realm of possibility. As such, updating legal documents like a last will and testament seem appropriate for someone in as precarious position as Epstein.

Inmates have assets and they have children. If one is going to prison for any amount of time, it would behoove her to make a last will to provide for her children in the event she passes away in prison and especially if there is no other parent. Moreover, a power of attorney and health care proxy should be executed.  Although at this time it appears that Epstein was not propelled to write a last will because of children, the disposition of his enormous assets was seemingly of concern. Given his wealth, measured in the court probate petition as $577 million, direction was necessary. The estate reportedly includes $56 million in cash, $112 million in equities, $200 million in hedge funds and private equity, and $18.5 million in “aviation assets, automobiles, and boats.”

Epstein named his longtime lawyers Darren K.  Indyke and Richard D. Kahn as executors. The executors have a set commission of $250,000 for their services. Medical entrepreneur Boris Nikolic, an advisor to Bill Gates, was reportedly surprised to hear of his appointment as successor executor.

The last will and testament is a “pour over” will which bequeaths the estate to a trust named “The 1953 Trust.” In that trust, which is not public, the specific beneficiaries are listed. The filing is in the probate court in St. Thomas, the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the last will states that Epstein was a resident. This certainly provides more privacy by making it more difficult for individuals to obtain the estate file.

Without a valid last will and testament, Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, would be his next of kin and under the laws of intestacy, his heir.  As the heir, he has the standing to object to the last will and testament based on the testator’s capacity, undue influence, lack of execution, or fraud.

Wills executed shortly prior to death are scrutinized by probate courts as to the testator’s frame of mind, capacity, and any suspicious activity. Given Epstein’s death so soon after the signing, in addition to his prior suicide attempt, the court will review the circumstances surrounding the signing  carefully.

Epstein’s accusers have already commenced civil proceedings against the Estate. As the last will has been filed with the probate court, the number of cases are likely to grow. The executors will need to review any claims against the Estate and they will seek to pay or contest them.

A question that will surely arise for Epstein’s executors is the existence of any additional heirs and any claims to paternity that they set forth. The existence of any children for Epstein would change the course and direction of the administration of his Estate.  Suicide, death bed will, will execution, heirs, probate and non probate assets, trusts, kinship, claims against the estate: in the few days that Epstein has been deceased, his estate is already providing the public with a robust primer on trusts and estates.

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Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com. 

Go to enough legal technology conferences and you’ll begin to realize that companies will time announcements of new developments and releases of their software to coincide with the event. It doesn’t take a marketing genius to figure that out.

This week, we spent time in the exhibit hall at ILTACON talking to leading companies in the legal technology space to flesh out new developments they are announcing during the conference. Below, in no particular order, is our report.

CloudNine is Advancing eDiscovery Software and Partnerships

Looking to add new and support existing customers, CloudNine is also expanding their footprint. At ILTACON, CloudNine unveils new features and upgrades to their eDiscovery suite of products. Last year, CloudNine acquired Law Pre-Discovery and Concordance from Lexis and they have been working to integrate them into their platform. Explore 7.2 is now faster and more scalable for large projects after adding multi-core, multi-threaded processing capabilities, and it connects more seamlessly with LAW.

• LAW 7.2 now includes more the powerful Turbo Import feature that imports and analyzes data 73 percent faster than LAW 7.0
• Concordance Desktop 1.07 has 70 percent faster import speeds, adds administrator tools, improves document and email text extraction, and adds new viewer and redaction capabilities
• Review 2019 has been completely modernized to improve speed, performance, and user experience, and new Family Tagging and Field Grouping is on display at ILTACON

CloudNine is also unveiling a new Office 365 connector later this year that extracts data from Office 365 and automatically loads it into Explore. Doug Austin, VP of Products and Services at CloudNine, says the improvements made to Law and Concordance have “demonstrated to our customers that CloudNine is committed to enhancing these products and implementing the functionality and performance improvements that our customers have wanted for a long time.  In addition to those improvements, CloudNine’s focus is to maximize the deployment flexibility of our product suite to support any implementation model and adaptability to support the customized workflow needs of our customers.”

RelativityOne Continues SaaS Market Growth

Less a new development than a continuing one, Relativity, the leading on-premise eDiscovery platform, announces continued growth of its SaaS-based RelativityOne product. With now more than 50 customers and over 1,500 unique organizations using the platform, customers are taking advantage of the added performance, scalability, and security of RelativityOne.

Relativity is also releasing RelativityOne Collect, their newly developed collection tool. It is Relativity-built and designed to provide customers options for collecting ESI from Office 365 in the Microsoft Azure environment. Right now, it is only available to RelativityOne customers. “We’ve been spending a lot of time making RelativityOne stronger and stronger — better performance, new enhancements, greater global reach — so it’s been really exciting seeing so many customers growing their businesses on the platform,” said Shawn Gaines, VP of marketing at Relativity. “Empowering end users and their partners to easily collect in the cloud is only part of that story, and there’s much more to come.”

iCONECT Integrates with Sentio

On the heels of their announcement last week of a strategic funding initiative intended to grow its market presence, iCONECT is now integrating Sentio’s continuous active learning technology to power the expansion of its existing analytics features. Sentio is already being used worldwide by other large companies, and iCONECT is building workflows that will enhance the use of machine learning in document review and analysis. Development has been ongoing in Q1 and Q2 this year with new releases coming over the near term. CEO Ian Campbell says that the Sentio technology “will power both our new continuous active learning workflow as well as manual review oversight workflow.” For users, this will improve the user experience and make machine learning more intuitive. “Our job as an industry leader is to constantly analyze and look over the horizon, identify innovative ways to address issues, and create simple solutions to assist clients interact with their data,” said Campbell.

Other Developments

Oasis Discovery unveiled a detailed case study that identifies and addresses precisely some of the questions that firms and corporate organizations are faced with when deciding whether to insource or outsource eDiscovery operations software. Oasis CEO Brandon Law says that “the case study represents a roadmap for firms looking to take eDiscovery operations to the next level.” The case study, he says, “would be valuable to any decision maker attempting to decipher the market for legal technology.” Read the case study here.

Reynen Court announced this week the release of the beta version of their SaaS-based subscription service designed to help firms run and manage software subscriptions, infrastructure, and services for new and existing technologies. Stay tuned to Above the Law for more information on this.

LogikCull announces some of the most disruptive pricing ever seen in the industry. CEO Andy Wilson told us that he used a significant portion of a recent funding round to conduct a pricing study. He tripled the size of the engineering team and spent a year on R&D to fulfill the mission of making eDiscovery available to masses, instantly and affordably. The result: $250 per month fixed fee pricing, no user or storage fees, and no data limits. Wilson also told us about a new feature in the LogikCull platform that categorizes audio and video files. Coming soon: Project templates and single sign-on for enterprise customers.

As the week progresses, we will gather additional intelligence from the legal technology community at ILTACON and report it here.

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Mike Quartararo is the managing director of eDPM Advisory Services, a consulting firm providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to the legal industry. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Mike has many years of experience delivering e-discovery, project management, and legal technology solutions to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe and is widely considered an expert on project management, e-discovery and legal matter management. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@edpmadvisory.com. Follow him on Twitter @edpmadvisory.