Gunmen tried to assassinate a Tanzanian opposition politician after a telecoms company secretly passed his mobile phone data to the government, according to evidence heard in a London tribunal.
The mobile phone company Tigo provided 24/7 phone call and location data belonging to Tundu Lissu to Tanzanian authorities in the weeks before the attempt on his life in September 2017.
The arrangement, which Tigo does not deny, was revealed in a claim by a former internal investigator for the company that was heard at the Central London employment tribunal this month.
Michael Clifford, a former Metropolitan police officer, claims that Millicom, the owner of the Tigo brand, sacked him for raising concerns about the affair.
“Mr Clifford’s case is that he was treated to his detriment, frozen out by [Millicom] and automatically unfairly dismissed because he made protected disclosures, or ‘blew the whistle’, in respect of matters of the utmost seriousness and public interest importance,” Clifford’s lawyers said in written submissions.
Lissu was attacked in his car in the parking bay of his parliamentary residence in Dodoma on 7 September 2017. The car was sprayed with bullets and he received severe injuries. Nobody has been prosecuted for his attempted murder.
Five days later, Clifford began investigating after hearing on a conference call that Millicom had been providing Lissu’s mobile phone data to the Tanzanian government. He later handed 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 tracking increased and [Millicom] used its human and electronic resources to livetrack 24/7 the location of two of Mr Lissu’s mobile phones.”
The data was passed to the government via WhatsApp messages, which Millicom was later asked to delete. No formal legal request for the data appeared to have been filed.
“In the claimant’s reasonable belief, this information tended to show that [Millicom] was involved in an attempted political assassination and act of terrorism,” Clifford’s lawyers said.
Clifford claims that after escalating his concerns, his relationship with his managers began to break down and they began to marginalise him within the company, before making him redundant in the autumn of 2019. Millicom disputes Clifford’s claim.
The company provides telecoms services to emerging markets in Latin America and also operated in parts of Africa during the period Clifford was employed. Its position is that at the time Clifford was dismissed, it was in the process of winding down a substantial proportion of its activities in Africa and that as such, his role was redundant.
It said Clifford had been asked to investigate the Lissu affair and had reported his findings as requested. It said that after receipt of Clifford’s report it had taken local legal advice, and some employees had been subject to disciplinary action.
It argued that Clifford was now retroactively asserting that his reports were internal whistleblowing, rather than merely the ordinary work he would be expected to carry out in his role as an investigator for the company.
The case has taken four years to reach trial, partly as a result of efforts by Millicom to have Clifford’s claim heard under reporting restrictions. At one point the firm argued that unless it was granted a secrecy order it would be unable to defend the claim. The secrecy application was dismissed earlier this year.
A spokesperson for Millicom said she could not comment because the legal dispute with Clifford was ongoing. She said an announcement last week that Millicom’s executive chair, Mauricio Ramos, was retiring was unrelated to the case.
Tanzania remains a dangerous country in which 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 before planned protests against killings and disappearances of opposition politicians.