More details here than we were able to smush into the print edition this week on a local legal happening. Leslie Newell Peacock reports:

Elgin Clemons Jr.

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  • Elgin Clemons Jr.

When a promised donation of $500,000 to the Arkansas Arts Center ostensibly from a Dubai businessman was a no-show, the lawyer who’d promised the gift made himself scarce as well.

Now, Elgin Clemons Jr., a former member of the Arts Center board and former attorney in the Wright, Lindsey and Jennings firm, has surrendered his Arkansas law license and suggests he himself may have been duped by persons representing Mohammed bin Ali Al Abbar.

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Clemons surrendered his license to avoid a disciplinary hearing by the state Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct, which had information that could have constituted “serious misconduct,” including representing both buyer and seller in several dubious business deals involving a group formed by Clemons, Al Abbar Group LLC. The Supreme Court granted the petition Feb. 24.

Clemons’ personal story is a compelling one: Raised by a single mother in a low-income housing project in Little Rock, Clemons attended Central High School and was elected governor of Boys State in 1984. He graduated from Princeton University in 1989 and New York University Law School in 1994. He practiced in New York before joining Wright, Lindsey and Jennings. Besides the Arts Center, Clemons served on the boards of the Enterprise Corporation of the Delta, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation at Princeton and on the board of trustees of Princeton. His petition lays out this background, and he states, “… somewhere on this journey I made some unfortunate choices as to those with whom I associated in legal and business matters and the problems described below arose.”

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