Reply #51: Aha, found it... [View All]

The article I was speaking of up thread:
http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:i-UIB1_hWx4J:kucinich.us/phpBB2/viewtopic.php%3Ft%3D398%26view%3Dprevious%26sid%3D155340c6f51922fb11888b3bd6c7cf06+alexandrovna+moody+stuart&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

Mods - I wrote the actual piece, please don't delete:


akota

PostPosted: +0000, Mon Dec 13, 2004 11:11 PM Post subject: FL voting list contractor tied to South African Apartheid Reply with quote
Director of firm that was paid to repair Florida’s voting list which disenfranchised African Americans has apartheid ties

Director of Florida voting contractor chaired companies linked to apartheid
By Larisa Alexandrovna and John Byrne | RAW STORY Staff

A lead director of the company hired by Florida to fix the state’s controversial felon voting rolls is also chairman of a company many regard as a former pillar of South African apartheid, RAW STORY has discovered.

Since joining the board of African mining conglomerate Anglo American plc a year ago, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart has sought to fend off class-action lawsuits from laborers and Africans who allege the company played a major role in propping up South Africa’s former apartheid government.

Moody-Stuart is lead external director of Accenture, the Arthur Anderson spinoff, which Florida hired to repair issues of eligibility the state’s central voting list. The list disenfranchised thousands of voters—many of them African American—in the 2000 presidential election cycle.

Contracted in 2001 for roughly $2.2 million, Accenture was hired to address voting eligibility issues which wrongly listed African-Americans as felons and thereby rendered them ineligible to vote under Florida law.

After three years on the project, the new list was scrapped July 10 of this year when the media and other watch groups discovered the list enfranchised Hispanic felons, without fully resolving eligibility issues of African Americans.

Miami-Dade, for example, received a filtered list from the state of more than 17,000 names, with only 14 of those wrongly identified as felons restored to the voting rolls. Some noted that Florida’s African Americans tend to vote Democratic, while Hispanics—in part due to the state’s Cuban-American population—tend to vote Republican.

Accenture also failed to comply with a 2000 NAACP settlement which required the firm to notify them and the U.S. Justice Department of project changes.

The Florida Inspector General’s Office issued a scathing 50-page audit on Nov. 22 addressing Accenture’s and the Division of Elections’ mismanagement of the project. The audit said inadequate project management within the state elections division created most of the problems.

Asked who was responsible for the failures, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood blamed “elections staffers who were handling the 2004 list had other duties and little time to supervise preparation.” Hood did not elaborate as to what the other duties were.

Moody-Stuart joined the board of Accenture in October 2001. His long career spans decades at Royal Dutch Shell, which he chaired from 1998-2001, and Anglo American, which he joined in 2003. Both companies are the target of ongoing class-action apartheid suits.

In 2003, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended that the country’s businesses be made to pay reparations to victims of apartheid unless they offer to play a more substantial role in reconstructing the country. The commission singled out three business sectors that benefited particularly from apartheid policies—singling out jointly-owned government companies, Swiss banks and particular mining companies such as Anglo American.

Anglo American rebuffed the idea, saying that past was behind them. Anglo director of corporate affairs Michael Spicer told South Africa’s Business Day in March 2003 that the firm did not consider reparations appropriate when “both the business and political environments had changed significantly.”

During the 1980s, Shell, among other traders, supplied the apartheid regime with oil even after repeated votes in the United Nations General Assembly for an embargo.

Roughly 15 million tons of crude oil reached apartheid South Africa every year, the Guardian’s David Pallister reported in May, 2001. While the oil had a value of $3 billion, South Africa paid an extra premium—as much as 80 percent above market price—as a bonus to companies willing to carry on the clandestine trade, the Guardian noted.

During his tenure at Shell, Moody-Stuart’s firm continued to take heat for allowing higher levels of pollutants at their South African facilities. A 2001 Inter-Press article, “Lingering Toxins a legacy of apartheid,” gave voice to complaints of South African locals, which the jointly-owned Shell and BP refinery Sapref strenuously denied.

“While it is impossible to process 180,000 barrels of crude oil a day without having an impact, we want to reduce that impact, control it and remove it where possible to the point where the good we do exceeds the disadvantages,” Sapref’s managing director said. He admitted, however, that they had discovered higher levels of sulfur dioxide than previously reported.

As recently as April 2003, an IOL article detailed a class action law suit filed by a U.S. attorney against Anglo American for damages of to $6.1 billion. The suit alleged that thousands of South African blacks were wrongfully terminated for lawful labor strikes because of “forced labor under inhumane conditions.”

Accenture contributed thousands of dollars to Republicans in Florida in the last election cycle, slightly more to Republicans than Democrats. The company is currently under

investigation for possible violation of the Foreign Corruption Practices Act which bans bribing public officials, Vanity Fair reported in October (PDF part one, part two). Its address in Bermuda has prompted some members of Congress to question whether the company is dodging taxes.

Anglo American also faces a 2004 suit from former South African gold mines who say that poor safety standards led to their developing the incurable disease silicosis, which can lead to tuberculosis. Gold mining has been linked to tuberculosis since 1913.

The company dismisses the allegations.


Look for links to Accenture and Choicepoint, if possible. Their biggest client is Halliburton