DAILY NEWS Reporter
Daily News; Wednesday,July 18, 2007 @00:04
A LEGISLATOR and prominent advocate, Mr Nimrod Mkono, and his partners have given two tabloids ThisDay and its sister paper Kulikoni 48 hours to apologise and pay them an unspecified amount of money in damages for publishing defamatory articles against them or face legal action.
Two demand notices made available to the Daily News showed that Mkono and Company Advocates acted for the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) in defence of a 108-million US dollar (129.6bn/-) claim by the late Devran Valambia.
In his two separate demand notices served by a law firm of Eric Ngmaryo yesterday to the two newspapers, Mr Mkono wants publishers of the tabloids to withdraw promptly the false defamatory allegations published in ThisDay and Kulikoni newspapers dated July 12 and July 16, this year, respectively, and apologise.
Mr Mkono, the Member of Parliament for Musoma Rural Constituency, wants the newspapers to publish the apologies to himself and the law firm in terms to be agreed upon, and undertaking by the tabloids not to repeat the allegations or similar ones.
The demands include payment of a substantial sum of money in damages to the firm to demonstrate the baselessness of the allegations and compensate the firm for injuring its reputation, and for financial loss and considerable distress that has been caused, as well as to cover legal costs.
The demand notice to ThisDay said: ...if we do not promptly receive your undertaking that you will comply with our demand, we shall issue proceedings for libel claiming damages commensurate with the gravity of the allegations. Should you decline to publish the statement please inform us of the name of your advocates who will accept service of proceedings on your behalf.
The notice to Kulikoni simply said: If, however, you force him (Mkono) to force him to go through along and draw out libel action in order to clear his name, his vindication will be an award to very substantial damages from court.
Mr Ngmaryo claims that the article in ThisDay headlined BoT spends 8bn/- on dubious legal bills, whose content entailed the history and media attention of the long running civil suit against the bank, enabled readers to identify the law firm (Mkono & Co Advocates) as the targeted prominent Dar es Salaam law firm.
He claimed that the article in Kulikoni with a headline Kampuni ya Mbunge yachota mabilioni kutoka Benki Kuu meaning (an MPs company scoops billions from the central bank) could be understood as alleging that Mr Mkono is unfit to be an MP let alone to be a practising lawyer and branded him as a fraudster.
Mr Ngmaryo claimed that the article linked the conduct of the firms operations with accusations levelled at the BoT Governor Daudi Ballali as being allegedly involved in massive funds misuse at the central bank and in the facilitation of dubious payments made from the BoTs commercial external debt account.