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Legal
Madonna responds to former employees’ lawsuit in Malawi
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 26 April 2011
Madonna’s legal people have filed papers with the Malawi court in response to a lawsuit by eight former employees of her abandoned Raising Malawi Academy For Girls venture, who are suing for unfair dismissal. The eight former staff members were let go after the RMAG project, funded by Madonna’s Raising Malawi charity, was halted in January amid allegations of mismanagement and money wasting.
The former employees claim Madonna’s charity did not follow proper procedures when they were let go, and also made them sign an “unfair” contract termination agreement. But in her court submission, Madonna says “there is nothing unfair about the termination, it was necessitated by genuine economic reasons”. She adds that the redundancies were done in line with Malawian rules, and that the termination contract was a confidentiality agreement which the former staff members signed in return for being given high pay offs than they were due under local laws.
Madonna has also asked that her US-based charity, Raising Malawi, be removed as a defendant in the lawsuit, arguing it is RMAG, a separate organisation based in Malawi, which both employed the plaintiffs and handled their redundancies.
