COMMENTARY

Law and Politics: The crows coming home to roost

by Lloyd Noel

Wednesday, July 7, 2004

The quote from Julius Caesar which said… “The evil that men do lives after them – the good is often interred with their bones,” is normally associated with people after their deaths.

But in recent times, the principle that the said quote was formulated to portray can be re-fashioned to read… “The evil that men do will catch up with them in this life, it is only a matter of time and patience.”

The other truism – “that whatever happens in the dark will one day come out in the light” – is now-a-days recurring with such regularity, that wrong-doers – especially those in positions of authority and public office – cannot be heard to say they were not put on notice.

In our own little neck of the woods in these Spice Isles, we must be leading the whole CARICOM region – if not the hemispheric portion of the global village that is earmarked to become the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA) – when it comes to suspect associations, and marriages of crooked financial convenience, and evil dealings with shady characters that fully demonstrate the ancient adage… “that the love of money is the root of the greatest evil.”

In fact, things have become so bad over the past four or five years, that in our OECS sub-region the free press in Antigua and St. Lucia have been styling our Tri-Island State as “Scandal-plagued Grenada,” when commenting on the Prime Minister and Eric Resteiner meeting in Switzerland.

Of course we had, before Resteiner, the Viktor Kozeny, Van Brink and Lawrence Rowe offshore banking fraud – among others.

And as if the birds of one feather cannot resist flocking together – the crows seem to be coming home to roost at the same time.

In a High Court of Justice case in the Chancery Division in London, England, between Kerry Cox and Lawrence Jones, a judgment was handed down on the 24th of June, 2004 in which Grenada was again featured in financial dealings of which the Judge described as… “It frankly smacked of bribery…”

For those who may have forgotten, Mr. Lawrence Jones, an English lawyer, was once the Chief Executive Officer for Van Brink’s First International Bank of Grenada (FIBG).

And not long before the said bank and its many subsidiaries collapsed in Grenada, and the fraudster Van Brink fled to Uganda – taking with him those millions of U.S. and Canadians citizens’ investments – the said Lawrence Jones had sent an email to his boss in which he described a Grenadian public official, who also happened to be a lawyer, as a useful member of a “team” that he (Jones) was putting together to service the “bank” and keep the FBI out of Grenada at the time.

In the said email Jones described that lawyer as “expensive but he had the ear of another public figure and is invaluable to us.” The Judge said in the judgment… “The reference to his being ‘expensive’ apparently referred to an occasion on which moneys were paid to this official (lawyer) for performing services which might be thought to be within his own duties.” Hence the Judge’s statement that… “It frankly smacked of bribery, and in his final speech Mr. Ashe (Lawrence Jones’s lawyer) was unable to accede to my invitation to find another description, but Mr. Jones did not acknowledge that.”

So other than the Offshore Alert publication, there in a High Court judgment in England – we have our public officials names featuring in financial scandals, that were linked to the same Van Brink and his gigantic offshore banking frauds that our Government facilitated.

And as the Timothy Bass/Eric Resteiner/Prime Minister saga continues to gain notoriety at home and abroad, we had reports of two new aspects that must have raised some eyebrows.

The first report concerns the Government’s response to the Chamber of Commerce letter to the Prime Minister, suggesting an independent enquiry into the claims and counterclaims from both sides in the saga.

The Government apparently sought a meeting with the Chamber’s Executive Board, and the persons who represented the Government at that meeting were the Special Adviser to the Prime Minister, Mr. Andrews, and the “Special Prosecutor” who heads the (FIU) Financial Intelligence Unit, Mr. Hugh Wildman. And one of the reported outcomes of that meeting was a request by the Government delegation that the Chamber should submit the terms of reference for the suggested independent enquiry.

If that reported outcome is accurate it raises all kinds of further concerns about this very disturbing scandal.

When the people’s elected representatives in Parliament visited the Commissioner of Police (C.O.P.) to seek the police involvement in an investigation, the same Mr. Wildman was ever-present as “Advisor.” And without any further ado, he was on national television and radio dismissing the request as utter nonsense. The so-called evidence presented was hearsay and inadmissible, he said, and the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition had opened himself to criminal libel.

The questions therefore beg themselves – has the Chamber of Commerce produced credible admissible evidence that is different from the NDC Opposition? Has any Chamber official seen the contents of the video cassette that Timothy Bass referred to in his affidavit?

If the answers to those questions are No – then who is it that decides that the businessmen’s organisation is more worthy of serious attention than the people’s elected representatives in Parliament?

And since it is reasonable to assume that the Chamber’s request, which was signed by the Board’s President Mr. Nigel John, was no different in terms of the evidence relied upon to ground the enquiry – than that of the Leader of the Opposition Hon. Tillman Thomas – what is the rationale for threatening the MP with criminal libel, and inviting the Board’s President to submit terms of reference?

Or is this another ill-advised tactical exercise, to try and divide the mounting hue and cry for justice to be seen to be done across the board – by according due recognition to the businessmen, and shameless disrespect for the Parliamentarians?

Whatever it is, or maybe, patience and time are the greatest healers and deciders.

Then we heard that the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Ministry responsible for Information, Senator Einstein Louison, had admitted to a Toronto radio station, that an independent enquiry into the various allegations involving the Prime Minister is perhaps the way to go, and he apparently hinted that the process had already started with dialogue with “civil society” – whatever that may be.

And since my expressed concerns about the silence of the Grenada Conference of Churches in this National crisis – I have been told that the Chairman of the GCC had made a statement, and or sent its concerns to Government.

I did not hear him, nor see any document to-date, so I must reserve my comments – but based on the “hearsay” report I got, at least that body has AWAKENED, so better late than never.

By the time you are reading this, our CARICOM Heads of Government would have completed their Twenty Fifth Meeting in Grenada, and we will no doubt be seeing the usual communiqué from the group about what was discussed, and what decisions were taken.

There can be no doubt that our region faces far more fundamentally crucial issues – touching and concerning the people’s basic human rights; the independence or dependence of each and every Island/State, in the unfolding hemispheric and global “getting together” that are being planned and still being discussed among the various leaders; and above all else, the united readiness of our people and our leaders to take those major decisions into the unknown – than at any other period in the region’s history.

Whatever nice-sounding words and phrases those Heads may use, during their meeting and in their public statement thereafter, the hard facts and the reality facing all our people regionally are very different in their daily lives.

All the issues on their agenda were important, but the big three were the FTAA, CSME and the CCJ – and all three are very closely inter-connected, both in the timing of their implementation or coming on stream, and in their inter-dependence on each other.
I saw the opening ceremony on television last Sunday at Grand Anse in St. George’s, and I heard our Prime Minister, in his address as the current Chairman of CARICOM for the next year, saying that he was amazed to hear people in Grenada and elsewhere in the region saying, that we are not ready yet for the CCJ. His boast was – “we are more than ready for our own final court.”

I did not hear or see anyone clapping for that statement, and I do not know what yardstick or criteria our Prime Minister as Chairman was using – he did not elaborate.

But I wish to update him with the views of no lesser person than the Chief Justice of Trinidad and Tobago, the Hon. Sat Sharma, published in the Trinidad Sunday Express on June 13th 2004.

He was commenting on the litany of woes in the justice system in Trinidad and Tobago, and in particular the Magistrates’ Courts where 95% of criminal cases are heard.

He said… “What passes for justice in the Magistrates’ Courts is in my opinion, a serious blot on the administration of justice. It is a stinging indictment on every arm of the State. The Magistracy has been frozen in time and time is some 40 years ago. Precious little has changed except, of course, that litigation in these courts has risen to such an extent that it renders the present system useless.”

The people he was blaming for that sad state of affairs were the politicians in Government over those years since Trinidad’s independence. We in the OECS and elsewhere in CARICOM can all echo with one voice… “and so say all of us.”

And remember, Mr. Prime Minister/Chairman, Trinidad and Tobago is the richest state in CARICOM and possess eminent jurists. In fact one of its ex-Chief Justices is widely tipped to be the first President of the CCJ – whenever that may be.

And although the headquarters of the CCJ will be in Trinidad and Tobago, that state is very far from ready to be a member itself – and that goes for the majority of independent states under your Chairmanship.

So Mr. Prime Minister/Chairman, it is not the shortage of fully qualified jurists to man the Court; nor should it be simply to show whoever that we are independent and can do our own thing. It is, in fact, that systems were not put in place over the years, and what is being planned now is an attempt to build a house from the highest top, with no foundation in place to support and maintain it.

That is not any show of independence – just political madness, which must be avoided at any cost.

I am off to the Privy Council in London for the next two weeks, where systems are fully in place to hear another appeal from Grenada – this time in the criminal field, not civil, so no further addition to our national debt forthcoming.

Lloyd Noel is a former Attorney General of Grenada, prominent attorney at law and political commentator.

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