6. The Consultant will charge the Client a flat fee of $3.7 million dollars for the services (the “Compensation”) for this two-year Contract.
7. The parties acknowledge that $1.2 million dollar’s of the Compensation has already been paid to the Consultant as ofthe date hereof, as a non-refundable retainer. The Consultant will invoice Client quarterly for amounts due.
Here is the May 7 filing with the Justice Department, by Gainful Solutions with a new “Exhibit AB” which includes both a letter purportedly canceling the April agreement, dated May 2, and the substitute agreement dated May 5.
On May 2 Gainful Solutions filed a “Short Form” Foreign Agent registration act for Ambassador Timothy Towell as an additional lobbyist and business agent with the title of “consultant” at compensation “to be determined” to go with the previous filings for Ranneberger, Soheil Nazari-Kangarlou and Constance Berry Newman.
Update: Politico reported on the contract change here in their “Influencers” newsletter, noting the compensation and identifying dropping reference to the hybrid court as the main change.
Amb. To Kenya Michael Ranneberger with late Kenyan diplomat Bethuel Kiplagat, defending Kiplagat’s controversial appointment by President Kibaki to head Kenyan TJRC
“I’m doubtful the revised contract means a substantive change to the lobbying deal,” Klem Ryan, former coordinator of the UN Security Council Panel of Experts for South Sudan, told Reuters.
“The rewording seems to be a response to the negative publicity that both the South Sudanese government and those associated with Gainful Solutions received, but not a rejection of the lobbying efforts.”
Rights groups accused the government of paying to avoid justice. The new contract was “a slap in the face to victims of the horrific crimes that have been committed in South Sudan,”said Elise Keppler, associate director of U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.
The government did not respond to requests for comment on the old contract or the new one.
Adding to a firestorm of criticism since the related Foreign Agent Registration Act filings from April 18 hit the press last week, a coalition of South Sudanese civil society groups has demanded that the contract be cancelled. Susan D. Page, the inaugural U.S. Ambassador to independent South Sudan called the contract “very disturbing and disappointing” on Twitter and former Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard called it “disgusting”. Our current Ambassador is quoted below explaining why he is disturbed.
6. List all employees who render services to the registrant directly in furtherance of the interests of any of the foreign principals in other than a clerical, secretarial, or in a related or similar capacity
Here are some links for a flavor of what seems to be as controversial a Foreign Agent Registration Act filing as I have seen:
The U.S. government, which backs the peace agreement, provided $4.8 million in 2016 through the African Union to set up the court, a State Department spokesman confirmed toForeign Policyin email.“The project is ongoing,”the spokesman said.
The lobbying contract provides an unusually candid glimpse into the South Sudanese government’s aims to undercut a peace deal it has committed to. Some current and former U.S. officials are outraged at the former diplomats involved in the contract for accepting millions of dollars from Kiir, whose government is accused of widespread human rights violations during the country’s five-year-long civil war.
US Ambassador to South Sudan, Thomas Hushek, described the contract with the lobby group as disturbing.
“This, to me, is very disturbing because this is a commitment made in the peace agreement. The hybrid court is part and parcel of chapter five of the peace agreement,” Hushek said, according to Eye Radio in Juba.
Beyond the outragethat has focused on the moral wrongs of any effort to block the hybrid court, the contract may expose its parties to legal peril in two distinct areas.
First, the contract’s clear intent to obstruct the formation of a key institution required by the peace agreement, the hybrid court, raises the prospect of sanctions pursuant to presidential Executive Order 13664, which permits sanctions against:
any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State…to be responsible for…(B) actions or policiesthat threaten transitional agreementsor undermine democratic processes or institutions in South Sudan; (C)actions or policies that have the purpose or effectof expanding or extending the conflict in South Sudan orobstructingreconciliation orpeace talks or processes.
Executive Order 13664 allows for the freezing of the property of any person so designated under the order. It may be applied to both U.S. and non-U.S. persons, whether within the United States or abroad.
Thesecondarea of legal jeopardy concerns three potential areas of non-compliance with the FARA: [issues of completeness and accuracy of disclosure in the filings and of late filing].
Amb. Ranneberger and Connie Newman at polling place in Nairobi, during Dec. 27, 2007 Kenyan election
Ranneberger’s “great friend and mentor” Connie Newman–his choice as lead delegate for IRI to observe Kenya’s ill-fated 2007 election–is separately registered as a “consultant” on the South Sudan deal [“As an advisor to Gainful Solutions, I will travel to South Sudan with the partners of Gainful Solutions for a meeting with President Kir, The meeting will discuss how to improve the relationship between the U.S. and South Sudan and thus promote peace and stability. Other work or meetings on my behalf with Gainful Solutions will be determined on a case by case basis. There is thus far no set agenda for future activity.” For a $5,000 fee.] as discussed in Aly Verjee’s blog post. Newman is a longtime lobbyist who has been Africa lead for the Carmen Group after serving as Asst. Secretary of State for African Affairs from June 2004 to April 2005 (with Ranneberger serving as Principle Deputy Asst.Sec.) and Assistant Administrator for Africa for USAID from 2001. As a domestic lobbyist in 1991 after a long pioneering career in federal service she was given high credit in GOP circles for helping to persuade the NAACP not to oppose the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall.
Everyone is rightfully outraged. More than 400,000 have died since South Sudan descended into civil war and millions more were displaced.
These revelations also highlight the many challenges the court is likely to face if and when it is eventually set up. South Sudanese political elites (on both sides of the post-2014 conflict) are not particularly keen on facing justice for atrocities committed against civilians and armed actors. It is also unclear if Juba’s friends in Kampala, Nairobi, or Addis have any incentive to inject yet another variable into the ongoing efforts to establish a modicum of stability in South Sudan.
Moral outrage alone will not move the needle. The court’s success will depend on how much pivotal actors within IGAD are willing to lean on Machar and Kiir.
In June 2007, newly “on the ground” in Nairobi as the resident Director for East Africa for the International Republican Institute, I was told that one of the President’s senior ministers wanted to meet me for breakfast at the Norfolk Hotel.
Fresh from my first meeting with the American Ambassador with his enthusiasm for the current political environment and his expressed desire to initiate an IRI observation of the upcoming election to showcase a positive example of African democracy, I commented to the minister over breakfast in our poshly updated but colonially inflected surroundings on the seeming energy and enthusiasm among younger people in Nairobi for the political process. I suggested that the elections could be an occasion of long-awaited generational change. He candidly explained that it was not yet the time for such change because “there has been too much corruption.”
The current establishment was too vulnerable from their thievery to risk handing over power.
Unfortunately I was much too new to Kenyan politics to appreciate the gravity and clarity of what I was being told, and it was only after the election, in hindsight, that I realized that this was the most important conversation I would have in Kenya and told me what I really needed to know behind and beyond all the superficialities of popular politics, process, law and diplomacy. Mea culpa.
After we ate, the minister naturally left me with the bill for his breakfast and that of his aide.
When it was all said and done, after the vote tallies were changed to give President Kibaki a second term through corruption of the ECK, and almost 1500 people had been killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced, and I finished my leave to work for IRI and was back at home in the United States, at my job as a lawyer in the defense industry, I eventually submitted “hotline” complaints to the Inspectors General of the State Department and USAID about what I considered improper interference by the American Ambassador with my work as an NGO employee administering the USAID-funded IRI Election Observation Mission as well as the Exit Poll.
As an exhibit to these complaints, in addition to the statement that I had written for The New York Times after they had called to interview me in July 2008, I prepared a Supplemental Statement to the State Department’s Inspector General. Seven years after the ill-fated election, having eventually gotten what I could from a round of FOIA requests to State and two rounds to USAID, I am still left with unanswered but concerning questions about what the “agenda” was and was not on the part of the Ambassador, whether it was successful or not, and how it infected my work and the election. I have no doubt that if we “hadn’t even been there,” to paraphrase the Ambassador, the election would have been stolen anyway, but we were there. In memory of Peter Oriare and Joel Barkan to whom I dedicated this series for their efforts for a free and fair election and transparent process in 2007, and in respect to my newer Kenyan friends who have been left to continue the work in the aftermath, with courage and determination in the face of increasing repression and threat, here it is:
