Month: August 2022

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – One of the more compelling elements from Tuesday’s hearing in the US District Court Northern District of California was how attorneys for both the PGA Tour and the three players who have been suspended for playing the LIV Golf events were forced to vaguely talk about the contracts players signed with the start-up league.

The contracts were provided to the PGA Tour’s attorneys but were sealed for confidentiality reasons which meant any reference to them during Tuesday’s hearing for a temporary restraining order had to avoid specific details, like the amount of each contract and any stipulations included in the deals.

One exchange between Judge Beth Labson Freeman and Robert Waters, the lead attorney for the three players, appeared to suggest that earnings from LIV Golf events were counted against a player’s contract guarantees.

“The guaranteed number [a LIV player can earn in an event] is $160,000,

Since US law firm Kirkland & Ellis announced it was setting up shop in Miami, private equity partner Jeremy Liss has found himself very popular with his colleagues.

The 49-year old is trading the windy city of Chicago for South Florida heat to run Kirkland’s new outpost and has been fielding calls from lawyers keen to join him ever since.

“The initial demand has been extremely strong. It’s probably even stronger demand than we had anticipated,” he said. “[Miami] is the hot place in the US . . . It’s becoming Wall Street south.”

Kirkland is one of a number of firms expanding to Miami to capitalize on a mass migration accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. In the year to July 2021, more Americans moved to Florida than any other state — 220,890 of them, according to census data. The influx included billionaires and hedge funds unmoored from their Wall

The US citizen and civil rights attorney Asim Ghafoor, who had represented Jamal Khashoggi before the Saudi journalist was murdered, has been freed from custody in the UAE where he was convicted on money laundering charges.

Ghafoor was headed home to the US, said his lawyer, Faisal Gill, having been freed after paying a fine and with help from the US embassy in the UAE.

A court on Wednesday upheld Ghafoor’s earlier in-absentia conviction, ordering him to pay a fine but revoking a three-year jail term handed down in May. UAE officials had no immediate comment.

Ghafoor – former lawyer of Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi journalist who was murdered at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018 – had been transiting through Dubai airport on 14 July when he was detained for the in-absentia conviction, handed down in May, for money laundering and tax evasion that followed a 2020 request

On the morning after she became a multi-millionaire, a South Carolina woman drove by the KC Mart No. 47 in Simpsonville where she bought her lottery ticket, to see if anyone was there, just in case she had made a mistake and didn’t really win.

It was the largest Mega Millions jackpot to be won by a single ticket — more than $1.5 billion — and she had seen the numbers reported on television.

“If no one was there, I would say, ‘okay, well this was a disaster, we made a mistake,’ and I’d drive home and all would be good. But as we went by the convenience store, there was every media — there was helicopters, there was every piece of media, there was locals, you know, national. I so badly wanted to get out of there, I wanted to go under the seat, I became anxious.”

That was