Government is giving the holder of the controversial Red House lease time to make “reasonable decisions,” failing which action will be taken, Attorney General Basil Williams said on Wednesday.
It has been more than a year since government expressed its objection to the lease and made it clear that it was going to take action. While government has outlined its plans for the facility, it has never indicated what action will be taken to reclaim it.
Asked at a press conference how much longer government will wait before action is taken, Williams said, “You see, you damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The president wanted to have that building, which is within the curtilage of State House, for the purposes of an office and it was a whole set of noise made about that. A reasonable request. Now if he had done the same thing and gone ahead and taken Red House you would have heard the same noises.”
He said that government is giving those in possession of Red House “the opportunity to act as reasonable people.” He pointed out that government has been faced with this situation since coming into office. “It’s a year and a half and nothing has been done. So when we act, we would not expect the media to go about its usual business,” he said.
Red House, which is now a repository of documents and information about late President Dr Cheddi Jagan, came up for much public discussion after Minister of State Joseph Harmon in August last year disclosed that the PPP/C administration had granted a 99-year lease to the Cheddi Jagan Research Inc, a private company closely associated with the PPP/C, at a rate of $1,000 per month. The government had labelled the deal “criminal” and had signalled its intention to investigate it.
