Secretary of the Guyana Cricket Board Anand Sanasie’s attempt to have a perjury charge against him quashed was rebuffed by acting Chief Justice Ian Chang recently who did not grant the orders nisi of certiorari sought by the accused.
The 46-year-old Sanasie, who was slapped with a perjury charge last year in his capacity as Secretary of the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB), had moved to the High Court through his lawyer Roysdale Forde to have orders nisi granted against Director of Public Prosecutions Shalimar Ali-Hack, acting Commissioner Leroy Brummell, Crime Chief Seelall Persaud and acting Chief Magistrate Priya Sewnarine-Beharry. The orders were to quash the charge of perjury instituted against him by the police following advice from the DPP.
Justice Chang found that the since the charge had already been instituted by the police at the time of Sanasie filing the motion there was no useful purpose in calling the DPP to show cause why her advice should be quashed. The court instead saw it fit to issue orders against the police.
And since the Chief Magistrate had nothing to do with the institution of the charge but rather was under statutory duty to carry the criminal process forward in accordance with the procedural statutory provisions no order ought to be granted against her either.
According to the ruling one of the grounds on which the applicant sought the orders was that natural justice was breached in that the institution of the charge was motivated by bias. The acting Chief Justice said that in stating this Sanasie could not be making the claim that although the evidence sufficed to support the charge against him, the decision to charge him should be quashed on the ground of motives which were improper.
He said in such a case he would have had to claim that such improper motives predominated in the making of the decision to charge him. But the true claim of Sanasie was that the decision to charge him was irrational in the sense that no reasonable decision-maker could have made a finding that there was sufficient evidence to support the charge against him.
According to Chang it does appear that in a criminal trial the case for the prosecution and the defence will turn essentially on the interpretation of the Deed of Transfer and whether or not ownership the property of GCB was indeed transferred to D.E.B Essential Organisation Inc or whether the company was merely an agent or alter ego of GCB and also what Sanasie understood to be the then existing state of affairs.
However, Justice Chang said that those are all questions of fact for the determination of the criminal court and not for a court of judicial review. He also dismissed the orders he had granted last year.
On July 10, 2012 Sanasie, of Area ‘G’ Patentia, West Bank Demerara, was charged with perjury and placed on $150,000 bail when he made his appearance before Magistrate Hazel Octive-Hamilton at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court.
The allegation against Sanasie is that on January 30 at Georgetown, being the deponent in an affidavit for an interim and amendatory injunction for damages and an order in the High Court of the Supreme Court of Judicature, in which the said Anand Sanasie is the petitioner and the Attorney General of Guyana, Clive Lloyd and Alfred King are the defendants, he knowingly, falsely swore that the assets of the Guyana Cricket Board were in his trust, well knowing the said transfer to the DEB Essential Organisation Incorporated.
