An immigration tribunal two Fridays ago ordered that former Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) employee Peter Ramcharran be deported from Canada but his attorney, Kaisree Chatarpaul, said on Thursday that he will be challenging that decision in Federal Court.
Speaking from his office in Ontario, Chatarpaul said that he now has 15 days to file a Notice for Leave and Judicial Review in the Federal Court and thereafter, he will have another 30 days to “perfect the appeal, perfect the application and then we will get a hearing.”
Chatarpaul was confident that he has a very strong case. “I think I have a fairly strong case. First of all, I think the immigration hearing was a disguised extradition hearing,” he stressed before adding that there is an abundance of Supreme Court cases that he can use to support his arguments.
He said that once the tribunal found his client inadmissible, a removal order must be made. “Once it finds that he was described as being inadmissible to Canada, the tribunal could make only a deportation order,” he said, before explaining that an application to the Federal Court for leave will stay that order. “In other words, it (the deportation order) is not enforceable,” he said.
Chatarpaul noted that while there are no other rights of appeal beyond the Federal Court, there are lots of things that his client can do.
Last June, Jagnarine Singh, former GRDB General Manager; Prema Roopnarine, former Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture; Ricky Ramraj, agricultural consultant; Badrie Persaud, business consultant; Dharamkumar Seeraj, the General Secretary of the Rice Producers Association and a PPP/C MP; and Nigel Dharamlall, also a PPP/C MP, all former GRDB Board members, were charged with failing to record entries for funds amounting to over $250 million in total in the agency’s general ledger, from 2011 to 2015.
At the same time, five charges alleging the falsification of GRDB accounts from 2011 to 2015 by Ramcharran were filed and sworn to at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Courts. However, Ramcharran was never present at court as he had reportedly travelled to Canada.
Chatarpaul said during an interview on Thursday that his client left Guyana legally for Canada to study prior to the arrest warrant being issued for him. He said that he has since completed his studies and is living and working in Canada.
The attorney had previously predicted that the tribunal would have found his client inadmissible.
Last month, Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) prosecutor Patrice Henry during a hearing of the criminal case in the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court, had informed Chief Magistrate Ann McLennan that the immigration procedures relating to Ramcharran have been completed and that they were awaiting the ruling on whether the suspect would be extradited. Henry, during his submissions to the court, did not say when the ruling will be made and the matter was subsequently adjourned to February 15th, 2019.
Chatarpaul, during the interview with Stabroek News, emphasised that no extradition proceedings were filed with respect to his client.
Convoke
“That is false. Mr Ramcharran has not been the subject of an extradition hearing although I had argued at the beginning that he should be,” he said, before further explaining that once he was charged in Guyana, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) got word of it and the arrest warrant that was issued for him in Guyana, was enough in Canada to convoke an immigration admissibility hearing.
He explained that the decision to convoke an immigration admissibility hearing stemmed from the fact that his client was charged in Guyana and that a warrant was issued for his arrest in regards to a criminal matter. He said that his client was in Canada lawfully at that time but there is “a provision under the [Canadian] Immigration Act that if a foreign national …or even a permanent resident, if evidence comes to the immigration that that person has committed, not convicted [or] has committed a crime in a foreign country which has the equivalence of a crime in Canada and carries at least ten years in jail, then that person is inadmissible and the admissibility provisions apply to both non-residents as well as residents…[but not] citizens.”
Chatarpaul explained that this immigration process involves trial by an immigration board member. He said that the tribunal decides whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that he [Ramcharran] has committed an offence that carries a ten-year sentence and this will make him inadmissible.
He said too that the tribunal had cross-examined Sherronie James, a Financial Investigator attached to SOCU, who testified via video conference over several days.
He said that James was responsible for 70 investigations involving the GRDB but under cross-examination, she admitted that she was a Senior Superintendent but she could not say who appointed her. Chatarpaul claimed that James even admitted that she was never interviewed nor was she appointed by the Police Service Commission. “I argued [that] would make her illegal,” he said adding that the SOCU official took offence with the fact that he was able to gain possession of certain documents.
According to the attorney, one of the arguments he plans to advance if the case reaches the Federal Court is that there were insufficient disclosures made. “Just like the lawyers in Guyana are arguing that the investigation came about as a result of a forensic audit report …that report is a primary document that should be disclosed. It wasn’t disclosed in Guyana and I think when there was an order that it should be disclosed, the bulk of it was rejected…Mr Ramcharran is entitled to be protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Section Seven of the Charter is very, very wide, the right not to be denied fundamental justice and if you don’t come with proper disclosures …but then the immigration authorities don’t have to but a court of law is bound by its charter rules,” he added.
Following his arrest on June 20th last year, Ramcharran was subjected to a detention review hearing and was released. He never taken back into custody by the Canadian authorities.