Author: TSA Press

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.

(We hate to state the completely obvious, but it’s unlikely that any “legal scholar” would use such language to describe what happened during the calls in question.)

If you didn’t think the ongoing defamation suit between Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, and Giuffre’s now-disqualified former attorney David Boies couldn’t get any more dramatic, there’s now a computer guy who’s maybe a hacker and almost certainly a con man that no one can identify smack in the middle of it all.

For some reason, Dershowitz wants to make this guy’s role a tentpole of his case.

At a hearing yesterday, Alan Dershowitz’s attorney Howard Cooper told Judge Preska that they intend to use discovery to explore the relationship between Boies, a different Giuffre attorney named Stanley Pottinger, and this unknown, now disappeared, computer guy.

While not making any hard-and-fast decisions on the issue, Judge Preska seemed less enthusiastic about an open-ended expedition:

“We are not doing all this stuff. This is not going to be a book for my dear friends the reporters to write on this whole matter. We need to narrow it down and get to the issues quickly,” Preska said.

This whole computer affair came to light over the weekend, when the New York Times told the story of a guy calling himself Patrick Kessler. Kessler — which is what we’ll call him even though the Times was unable to confirm his identity — apparently presented himself as having gained access to Jeffrey Epstein’s video records when he was hired to encrypt them. He claimed that he had secured photographic evidence of prominent men taking part in Epstein’s underaged sex-trafficking operation and tried to present his supposed evidence to Boies and Pottinger, who hoped to use the evidence to support legal claims brought by victims they represented.

According to the Times article, after being unveiled as a possible source in the case, Kessler told reporters privately that he’d grown disillusioned with the Giuffre team, believing that it wouldn’t use the evidence to expose the perpetrators publicly — supposedly Kessler’s paramount interest as a means of preventing future abuse — and that he wanted to work with the media instead. The article asserts that Pottinger had made a series of sketchy statements to Kessler that led Kessler to believe the attorney wasn’t on the level, including statements about securing settlements to pay Kessler out of legal fees and agreements to become attorneys for the alleged abusers.

Of course, the NY Times source on this was… Kessler. That means the guy the paper ultimately suggests was a con man was also their source? That doesn’t raise any red flags?

Non-lawyers jump to conclusions about how lawyers are paid all the time, imagining every agreement to be some sort of corrupt bargain instead of just how the industry works. And representing the other side after a settlement — something the Boies firm attests in a statement was never considered — isn’t unheard of as a settlement condition. If a non-lawyer heard that and didn’t know any better they could easily assume it’s a shady double-cross of the victim instead of functionally a retainer not to sue the defendant again post-recovery. Maybe Pottinger did say and mean some crazy stuff, but years of reading non-lawyers report on the legal industry makes me skeptical, especially when they’re just reporting based on the tale of someone they openly doubt throughout the rest of the piece.

It’s almost as though the Times tried to connect dots that weren’t there, trying to draw parallels with the infamous Trump Tower meeting, suggesting that trying to secure evidence in a civil lawsuit is the same as entertaining kompromat from a foreign power in an election. They are, you know, different.

For its part, BSF released a statement addressing the Times narrative that Boies or any of his partners were trying to keep Kessler’s revelations secret:

By way of example, the NYT knew all of the following: David Boies only attended two meetings with the NYT’s source (on September 9 and September 14, the latter of which was also attended by the NYT reporters), nothing was said at either meeting that supports the NYT’s narrative, no one from BSF had any other communications of any kind at any time with the NYT’s source, and no one from BSF participated in, or was contemporaneously aware of, the text messages exchanged between other parties that the NYT references. The NYT also selectively elided or omitted from its reporting key facts, documents, and interviews inconsistent with its chosen narrative. The fact that the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office were informed of these contacts belies the NYT’s assertions of wrongdoing.

Informing the authorities would make for a really difficult blackmail operation, which after all, is Dershowitz’s claim. And obviously the lawyers brought in the FBI and prosecutors because if this Kessler person was telling the truth, he had access to images of child exploitation which the government would absolutely need to know about.

But the craziest part of the Times article is when it explains that Kessler then went to Dershowitz and told him, in a recorded conversation that the reporters suggest may have been rehearsed, that none of Kessler’s supposed evidence showed Dershowitz. It’s not particularly clear why someone trying to publicly expose people would ever go to another guy accused of this stuff. Even if he had no evidence showing Dershowitz involved, this Kessler guy would have no reason to think that was dispositive. He couldn’t have believed he had the entire universe of every Epstein encounter ever, so under the most generous theory, Kessler’s basically telling Dershowitz, “I can’t prove you definitely did anything, so I’m assuming that my not having a photo of it is more believable than a woman’s testimony.”

That’s… not particularly compelling.

What is the point of dragging Kessler into this case? Does Kessler’s statement supposedly exonerate Dershowitz? Because that would involve believing Kessler was the genuine article. Or did Boies taking a meeting with Kessler support the claim that people are trying to blackmail Dershowitz with false claims? Because that would involve believing Kessler was a con man. If Kessler was a fraud then the lawyers got duped but that also means everyone’s back at square one. If Pottinger crossed the line in the stuff he told Kessler — which we can only really back up with Kessler’s story to reporters — it may be unethical but also not end up having much bearing on the truth of the claims at hand.

The only thing more astounding than the fact that a random mystery man has managed to troll a high-profile litigation is the altogether depressing idea that we may still be talking about him for months on end.

Jeffrey Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz hopes to use N.Y. Times mystery man to help his case [Miami Herald]
Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’

Earlier: David Boies Sues Alan Dershowitz, Becomes A Pro Se Litigant
Dershowitz Wanted To Get Boies Disqualified… So Now He Has To Deal With Another Famous SCOTUS Litigator
Judge Mocks That Bonkers Republication Argument Dershowitz Made
Alan Dershowitz Says He Has A ‘Perfect Sex Life,’ Answering The Question Literally No One Asked
Who’s Up For A Fun Night Out Watching Alan Dershowitz Talk About Sex Trafficking?
Dershowitz’s Motion To Disqualify Boies Schiller Immediately Dumped For Hilarious Reason
Harvard Law School’s Dershowitz Moves To Disqualify Boies Schiller In Sex Trafficking Case
Dershowitz Wanted A Trial Over Sex Trafficking Accusations — He’s Getting One
Some (Tentative) Good News For Alan Dershowitz… And Some More Bad News
I Just Had To Think About Alan Dershowitz’s Underwear And Now So Do You
Alan Dershowitz Says He Thinks He Should’ve Gotten Epstein A BETTER Deal In Wild Doubling-Down Interview
After Publicly Demanding His Accusers Sue Him, Dershowitz Is Arguing That His Accusers Have No Basis To Sue Him

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.