Gunmen attempted to assassinate a Tanzanian opposition politician after a telecommunications company secretly passed his mobile phone data to the government, according to evidence presented in a London court.
Mobile phone company Tigo provided 24/7 call and location data on Tundu Lissu to Tanzanian authorities in the weeks leading up to the attempted murder of him in September 2017.
The deal, which Tigo does not deny, was revealed in a lawsuit by a former internal investigator at the company that was heard at the central London employment tribunal this month.
Michael Clifford, a former Metropolitan Police officer, claims he was sacked by Millicom, which owns the Tigo brand, for raising concerns about the matter.
“Mr Clifford’s case is that he was treated to his detriment, excluded by (Millicom) and automatically unfairly dismissed because he made protected disclosures, or ‘whistleblowing’, regarding matters of the utmost gravity and importance of public interest,” Clifford’s lawyers said in written submissions.
Lissu was Attacked in his car On 7 September 2017, in the car park of his parliamentary residence in Dodoma, the young man was hit by bullets and seriously injured. No one has been prosecuted for his attempted murder.
Five days later, Clifford began investigating after learning on a conference call that Millicom had provided Lissu’s cellphone data to the Tanzanian government. He later provided a summary of his findings to his superiors, his lawyers said.
The report concluded that “information had been provided to the Tanzanian government since 22 August 2017,” the lawyers said. “From 29 August 2017, the intensity of the monitoring increased and (Millicom) used its human and electronic resources to track live 24/7 the location of two of Mr Lissu’s mobile phones.”
The data was transmitted to the government via WhatsApp messages, which Millicom was later asked to delete. No formal legal request was apparently made to obtain the data.
“According to the plaintiff’s reasonable belief, this information tended to demonstrate that (Millicom) was involved in an attempted political assassination and an act of terrorism,” Clifford’s lawyers said.
Clifford says that as his concerns escalated, his relationship with his managers began to deteriorate and they began to marginalize him within the company, before firing him in the fall of 2019. Millicom refutes Clifford’s claim.
The company provides telecommunications services to emerging markets in Latin America and also operated in parts of Africa during the period that Clifford was employed. Its position is that at the time Clifford was dismissed, it was in the process of winding down a substantial part of its activities in Africa and that its role was therefore redundant.
He said Clifford had been asked to investigate the Lissu case and had reported his findings as requested. He said that after receiving Clifford’s report, he had sought local legal advice and that some employees had been subject to disciplinary action.
He argued that Clifford was now retroactively claiming that his reports were internal whistleblowing, rather than simply the ordinary work he was expected to carry out in his role as a company investigator.
The case took four years to come to trial, in part as a result of Millicom’s efforts to have Clifford’s suit heard under reporting restrictions. At one point, the company argued that unless it was granted a confidentiality order, it would be unable to defend the suit. The confidentiality request was dismissed earlier this year.
A Millicom spokeswoman said she could not comment because the legal dispute with Clifford was ongoing. She added that last week’s announcement that Millicom Chief Executive Mauricio Ramos would retire was not related to the case.
Tanzania remains a dangerous country to be a member of the political opposition, despite a change of president in 2021. On Monday, police arrested Lissu and at least a dozen others ahead of planned protests against the killings and disappearances of opposition politicians.
