DESPITE the different headline, today’s column is the second one of three parts. Though dealing with stand-alone topics, when taken together, it expresses a complete thought. Please keep the original context from last week when the conclusion is presented next week.
After examining aspects of the predicament facing the Mohameds, I now come to allegations and charges brought against PPP officials by the APNU+AFC government. Those charges must be taken in their proper political context. The context is that the APNU+AFC, while in opposition between 2011 to 2015, spoke convincingly of corruption in the PPP government.
The Ramotar-led PPP government was extremely lacklustre in providing robust responses to these claims, in fact, they employed one jejune response, “bring the evidence.” This political misalignment and mis-framing of the messaging by the PPP resulted in strong voices to “jail dem.” Khemraj Ramjattan took lyrical declarative centre stage, “We will fire, fry and jail corrupt PPP officials.”
The APNU+AFC won power in 2015 by anchoring a large part of their campaign on the “jail dem” theme. When they got into power and did rudimentary investigations, it was clear that they found no real evidence of endemic state corruption. As a result, they turned to the infamous “forensic audits.”
Based on law, only the Auditor General or the Public Accounts Committee can procure services of external auditors for government accounts. The APNU+AFC government, in breach of the Audit Act, directly usurped the functions of the Audit Office and employed auditors without any public tendering process. As a matter of fact, every person who was handed these so called forensic audits were either card-carrying members of the coalition parties or a publicly sworn enemy of the PPP. In fact, it is on public record, one of the individuals hired to conduct the audits described the entirety of the process. They were each called by the Minister of Finance and told that there were a number of named entities to be audited and asked which ones they preferred. Each of them was given the fiat to conduct the audits after making a choice, based solely on personal whim; classic “ab na bab na A-B-C.”
When these Oprah Winfrey-styled audits – “you get an audit, you get an audit, everyone gets an audit” – were illegally allocated, they came back empty; there was no credible or provable evidence of corruption. This excursion however raided the treasury in excess of a billion dollars. If we throw in the useless State Asset Recovery Agency (SARA), we may tip the five-billion-dollar mark. With all that funding and the huge salaries, SARA was only able to recover two semi-derelict vehicles parked in the yards of two officials. As it turned out, the vehicles broke down and the relevant parts did not make economic sense to procure. The related state officials simply did not get around to towing those vehicles back to the relevant government compound.
The APNU+AFC government was under self-imposed public pressure to prove the existence of widespread, rampant corruption it said existed. They did the next logical thing, trump up some charges against PPP officials. Some of the victims being Anil Nandlall – accused of removing a volume of books from his office; Ashni Singh/Winston Brassington – selling land to Movie Towne without first getting a valuation; Nigel Dharamlall, Dharamkumar Seeraj, Madanlall Ramraj – making clerical errors in journal entries; Irfaan Ali – being the housing minister acting on a Cabinet decision, authorised the sale of house lots allegedly below the assumed valuation made by the APNU government. Then you had the Jennifer Westford case. It may be interesting to note that Dexter Todd was her attorney in 2018.
In total, there were in the vicinity of 120 individual charges involving over 30 persons.
There is more intrigue in these cases. By law, the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions is independent and not subject to interference by any other authority and is the sole agency tasked with employing external attorneys to prosecute any criminal matter as special prosecutors. These provisions were completely ignored, and special prosecutors were directly employed by the office of the Attorney General, thereby usurping the functions of the DPP. Each of the prosecutors had direct professional or family affiliation to persons in government. One special prosecutor was the brother of a serving minister, while several others were associates in the chambers of a senior minister of government.
Like the audits, these appointments were also handed out in Oprah Winfrey style, and guess what? None of the charges against the 30+ persons or any of the 120+ counts resulted in a single conviction. Yes, you read that right, not a single conviction. The charges were never meant to secure convictions; they were brought to stave off embarrassment from and satiate the appetite of a small but vociferous lunatic fringe. The charges were also meant to fool the population that the APNU+AFC government cared about corruption and to deflect from its own corrupt shortcomings.
When the PPP was returned to office in 2020, the charges remaining were the famed “19 fraud charges” and the “law book” charges. For the first time, the DPP had direct control of the cases. Upon examination, the DPP found insufficient evidence and both cases were withdrawn. About the “law books” case, Anil Nandlall sued Basil Williams in civil court where he challenged Williams to show evidence that the books were improperly removed, suffice it to say, Nandlall won judgement in excess of G$10M.
The APNU+AFC is left with a mutually exclusive claim of its own record. If it continues to claim that the pre-2015 PPP was corrupt, it must naturally accept that they were incompetent and didn’t know what they were doing. Conversely, if they were competent and this competence could not succeed in proving corruption, then the claim of corruption must be abandoned.