Message Body (5 of 6) APPEAL TO MOZILLA FOUNDATION BOARD OF DIRECTORS 1) Erroneous Legal Conclusions:
The Module Owner’s discretionary decision was guided by an erroneous legal conclusion, when he determined that the legal ownership structure of the Applicants was insufficient to allow them to operate independently. a) Digital Trust is an affiliate of DarkMatter and has never been owned by it as a subsidiary since its incorporation in April 2016. Both companies are subsidiaries of their parent company, Dark Matter Investments. The Applicants have provided the necessary legal documents to Mozilla, and have further disclosed all ultimate beneficial shareholders in a transparent manner. > DarkMatter has argued that their CA business has always been operated > independently > and as a separate legal entity from their security business. Furthermore, > DarkMatter states > that once a rebranding effort is completed, “the DarkMatter CA subsidiary > will be completely > and wholly separate from the DarkMatter Group of companies in their > entirety.” However, in the > same message, DarkMatter states that “Al Bannai is the sole beneficial > shareholder > of the DarkMatter Group.” and leaves us to assume that Mr. Al Bannai would > remain the > sole owner of the CA business. More recently, DarkMatter announced that they > are transitioning > all aspects of the business to DigitalTrust and confirmed that Al Bannai > controls this entity. > This ownership structure does not assure me that these companies have the > ability to > operate independently, regardless of their names and legal structure. [1] It is a fundamental principle of law that corporations have a statutory personality distinct from their shareholders. If taken at face value, the Module Owner’s erroneous assertion would imply that even the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation do not have the ability to operate independently, regardless of their names and legal structure. It should be noted that a number of CAs, e.g. Google and Sectigo, have complicated ownership structures and this is not cited in their ability to operate independently. We note that to-date that the Module Owner has not made this type of claim against any other Mozilla Root Store participant. Unless the above reasoning is held to be an Erroneous Legal Conclusion made by the Module Owner this would be, in our view, another new standard that will be discriminatorily applied only to the Applicants, solely on the basis of incorporation and residence in the United Arab Emirates. [1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/nnLVNfqgz7g/TseYqDzaDAAJ Benjamin Gabriel | General Counsel & SVP Legal Tel: +971 2 417 1417 | Mob: +971 55 260 7410 benjamin.gabr...@darkmatter.ae The information transmitted, including attachments, is intended only for the person(s) or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and destroy any copies of this information. _______________________________________________ dev-security-policy mailing list dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy
