TANGLED UP WITH TOM

Bewildering attempts at logic as Sars boss tries to explain why he is happy to have his deputy back in the office

Lavery Modise, chairman of law firm Hogan Lovells, has had a nightmare month. Modise (62) is one of SA’S preeminent labour lawyers. A son of a nurse, and a nursing sister, his story is a compelling tale of someone who rose from rags to become a judge in the labour court.

When he was seven or eight, he and his parents were forcibly removed from Weston (near what used to be Sophiatown) and shunted to Soweto — an incident which gave him his first sense that “something was wrong”.

“From that time, I think I told myself that I wanted to become a lawyer,” he said in an insightful interview he gave to the Legal Resources Centre years ago.

It was a hard grind. Through Morris Isaacson school, matric at Orlando High (1974), then numerous interrupted stints at Turfloop and Fort Hare (where he was deemed a “troublemaker”), till Modise finally got a permit (which black people needed during the dark days of PW Botha) to finish his law degree at Wits, where his classmates included Patrice Motsepe.

In the 1990s, Modise became the first black partner at Routledge Mccallum, which was rebranded as Routledge Modise. Then, in a headline-grabbing coup in 2013, Routledge Modise “married” Hogan Lovells, the 14th-largest law firm in the world (revenue Us$1.82bn last year).

Today, four short years later, Hogan Lovells is learning just how toxic a blunder it can be to take on Tom Moyane’s SA Revenue Service (Sars) as a client.

Modise’s firm is now at the centre of a raging storm over the Sars second-in-command, Jonas Makwakwa, who was “cleared” of wrongdoing thanks to an investigation the law firm did for Moyane. Hogan Lovells’ brief: scrutinise R1.3m in “suspicious and unusual” payments made to Makwakwa, and flagged by the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) as being possibly corrupt.

Three weeks ago, Moyane said Hogan Lovells had

Hogan Lovells is learning just how toxic a blunder it can be to take on Tom Moyane’s Sars as a client