Smafty Mac: Fighting the kakistocracy!!!

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 [R] blamed “elections staffers who were handling the 2004 list [who] 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.