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An embarrassment rather than a celebration

Introduction
Fate could hardly have been crueler. This week marks the first occasion that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) is meeting in Guyana as an itinerant court. It should have been a moment of pride for our judiciary and a tribute to our own Justice Madame Desiree Bernard, CCH, OR on whose long legal career, including a place on the CCJ, the curtain will soon close. Instead, the cocktails and lunches being arranged for our distinguished visiting legal luminaries will not erase the embarrassment of the most recently appointed member of our appellate court Justice Rabi Sukul being disbarred from practising in the UK by the Bar Council of England and Wales for intentionally misleading his client by drafting false grounds of appeal.

At every hopeful point at which the pessimists think the country has exhausted its sack of scandals, another one surfaces, exposing the immoral underbelly of a soulless country: one of failed, or dysfunctional, or non-functional national institutions. A separate piece can be written about every one of those institutions and even more about the individuals responsible for their moribund state. But we – and I mean mainly the business class and the professionals – are too comfortable, compromised or cowardly to challenge the illegalities and improprieties that are perpetrated daily by public offices in Guyana.

What is frightening is that a colleague who practises daily in the courts told me that the sin of drafting false grounds of appeal that led to the disbarment of former Justice Sukul is committed regularly in the Guyana courts, even by seasoned lawyers. Those civilized rules seem alien to Guyana where an attorney convicted and jailed in Canada practises in the courts in Berbice despite the information about his conviction having been brought to the attention of and acknowledged by the Attorney General.
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Written Submission to the Select Committee on the AML+CFT (Amendment) Bill 2013

The following is the text of recommendations made to Mr. David Granger, Leader of the Opposition, in connection with the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Finance of Terrorism (Amendment) Bill 2013. In addition to these recommendations, I provided him with a copy of my submission to the Select Committee on May 24, 2013 (see here)

In my view there is need not only to address the amending legislation but the principal Act as well. Indeed I do not believe that there is anything particularly troublesome about the amendments: the problems are with the principal Act.
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Satisfaction with the appointment of an Ombudsman

I would like to express satisfaction and extend my congratulations on the appointment of retired Judge Winston Moore as Ombudsman. To President Ramotar I say well done on this first step to establishing and/or restoring non-functioning constitutional offices, and to Mr Moore congratulations. It must have taken courage by the President to make the announcement to fill an office that his predecessor left vacant for more than a full presidential term.

Guyana has the distinction of being the first country in the Commonwealth Caribbean and Western hemisphere and second only to New Zealand among Common-wealth countries to have a constitutionally entrenched Ombudsman system. In Guyana, the Office of Ombudsman is a requirement of the constitution and is buttressed by a separate statute.

The Office of Ombudsman was created in the 1966 Independence Constitution and its powers have remained largely unchanged since then: to investigate any administrative action taken by any government department or other authority or by the President, ministers, officers or members of any government department or other authority. The 1980 Constitution brought actions by the President within the scope of the Ombudsman’s powers.

Given the tremendous backlog of matters which would fall to be investigated and the loss of institutional capacity to deal with them, Mr Moore has a herculean task on his hands. He will need not only the necessary resources but also the cooperation of the public and of the government agencies against which complaints are lodged.

In a Foreword to the publication of the Role of the Ombudsman in Guyana by the previous Ombuds-man, Mr S Y Mohamed, former Chancellor of the Judiciary Keith Massiah noted that Mr Mohamed had “exposed the frustrations of the Office, the scant regard paid to his recommendations by public officials, seeming lack of parliamentary interest in his work and the discourtesy of some public officers…”

At the swearing-in of Mr Moore, President Ramotar said that “constitutionally the country needs not only an Ombudsman but one that is effective.” The President must now ensure that the resources to make the office effective are provided and that the government establishes a strict protocol requiring public officers to cooperate with the Ombudsman and his staff.

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Forestry Commission’s Reports – An affront to decency

Introduction
Section 25 of the Guyana Forestry Commission Act 2007 requires the Commission to submit, no later than six months after the end of the year, a report to the subject Minister (currently of Natural Resources and the Environment) containing an account of its activities in such details as the Minister directs together with a copy of its audited accounts for the year. The Minister is then required to lay these in the National Assembly as soon as possible but not later than eight months after the end of the financial year.

The pre-2007 law did not impose any time within which these two reports were to be tabled in the National Assembly. But surely no matter how grievous the failure to prescribe a date is, it could hardly have been expected that the annual report for 2005 would be tabled until eight years later. But that is just what happened when on November 7, 2013 Mr. Robert Persaud tabled the report and some accounts of the GFC for the eight years 2005-2012 inclusively.

But the late tabling is hardly the only problem in relation to the reports for 2005-2012 to which I will return shortly. The other is that no one seems concerned that there appears to be a black hole when it comes to reports prior to 2005. The official records of documents laid in the National Assembly for the eighteen years from 1996 to 2013 reveal that the first year for which any report or audited financial statements were laid in the National Assembly was in 2013!

What exactly have successive Ministers of Agriculture, including Mr. Robert Persaud, been doing that prevented them from tabling any reports for perhaps as long as two decades? The same question must be asked of the Public Accounts Committee which is responsible for the oversight of not only the government accounts but also “such other accounts laid before the Assembly as the Assembly may refer …”; and of the National Assembly and the shadow minister; and of the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Natural Resources chaired by the shadow minister; and of the clearly compromised Audit Office.
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The MURI Deal and the national interest

Introduction
The permission dated November 7, 2012 granted by Mr. Robert Persaud, Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment to MURI Brazil Ventures Inc. (MURI) to undertake surveys over 2,200,000 acres of land on the Guyana/Brazil border has attracted some revealing responses. Among the contributors were current and former Army personnel; politicians Dr. Roger Luncheon and Mr. Joseph Harmon; private sector official Mr. Clinton Urling and columnist Ralph Ramkarran; and persons connected with the mining sector Mr. Anthony Shields and the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association. MURI, through its PR agency, itself issued a statement early in the week.

Many of the contributors, using information which seem to have their origin in official sources, went out of their way to defend the Minister, avoiding any reference to the Minister’s clearly misleading statement to a parliamentary select committee that the “position of the government at this point in time is not to permit mining in that specific area…” more than a year after he had guaranteed to MURI eighteen licences in the area. With such gratuitous support and defence of his exposed flank, the Minister followed the road of discretion and has so far said nothing further on the matter.

On the other side, the leader of the AFC Mr. Khemraj Ramjattan and the APNU shadow minister Joseph Harmon were adamant and categorical that the Permission was tainted and that the Minister had deceived the parliamentary Select Committee and ought to be rescinded.

This contribution will do a brief review of some of those contributions before going on to explain why I believe that the permission ought not to have been granted in the first place and make my own conclusions.
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