Condemning the State Assets Recovery Agency’s (SARA) recent civil proceedings against former President Bharrat Jagdeo and six other persons as illegal, former Attorney General Anil Nandall yesterday said it was a desperate move by an illegitimate body.
He believes that SARA should use its time to investigate a number of allegations made against members of the current APNU+AFC administration as he feels “damning evidence” lies there.
“In my respectful view, it would be premature for any legal proceedings to be heard and determined under the SARA Act without the legality of that Act itself being first determined by Court,” Nandall said.
SARA is specifically mandated to recover state property or benefits obtained through unlawful conduct by public officials or other persons.
Ramon Gaskin has however turned to the High Court to have the State Assets Recovery Act (SARA) scrapped. That case is yet to be substantively heard by Chief Justice (ag) Roxane George-Wiltshire SC. Nandlall believes that all SARA matters should be put on hold until the ruling of the court, even as he deemed the head and deputy of the agency as illegitimate.
Stabroek News on Monday reported that Director of SARA Clive Thomas said that a total of eight cases were filed last Friday to go after persons who are in possession of state assets. Aside from Jagdeo, the other defendants are former Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee, former Housing Minister Shaik Baksh, Lisaveta Ramotar, who is the daughter of former president Donald Ramotar, businessman Ramesh Dookhoo, former Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) president Professor Compton Bourne, and Florrie Loretta Ramnauth.
The cases concern parcels 241, 246,175,240, 243,174,183 and 173.The court is yet to fix a date or assign a judge to hear the cases.
Nandall said that he is perplexed as to how SARA could file proceedings when there is a pending court matter on the Act and that the Head was not appointed through the legal channel.
“I see rather than put its own house in order, I observed, that SARA is moving to institute legal proceedings against a number of persons. You will recall that on a number of occasions, I have pointed out to the press that both the director and deputy director of SARA are holding office illegally. The SARA Act expressly provide that these two officers, who held office even before the Act came into force were only to remain in office transiently until the National Assembly appoints appropriately
qualified persons to these offices. That appointment process, must have been moved by the government,” he said.
“Over two years after the Act came into force, the government never initiated the process for persons to be lawfully appointed to those offices under the act. So it is without doubt that Professor Clive Thomas and his deputy, Aubrey Heath-Retemyer are holding offices
illegally. Since the Act came into force, a legal challenge was filed against the constitutionality of several of its provisions that legal challenge was never heard and determined by the court and it is still pending,” he added.
He believes that rather than move to file legal proceedings against persons, “It is eminently more advisable that SARA addresses these two issues first as they will certainly have an impact on the ability of the agency to prosecute the alleged cases, which it seemed to be instituting.”
The former Attorney General said that since SARA became operationalized there have been serious allegations, with concretized proof to back it, with huge loss of state assets far more recent than Pradoville 2.
“They are far more egregious but they have not attracted the attention of SARA although we have made several calls for these transactions to be investigated. We have, for example, the notorious Drug Bond Rental Contract of a Sussex Street property. They are speaking about market value? That is the most vulgar rental contract ever made on planet earth; where a house was rented …at a cost of $12.5M per month for over two years and the advance payment alone of the rent to the landlord was presumably used by the landlord to acquire the property. That advance rental was paid even before the man purchased the property. Then there is the D’Urban Park fiasco where the Auditor General recently indicated that over $450M is missing. In this case, a private company owned by ministers of the government and persons working within the Office of the President, used state funds without any resort to the Public Procurement Laws, commenced that project and to date has never submitted a report of its income and expenditure to anybody,” he said.
Nandall said that given the allegations against government, it leaves the public wondering if “SARA serious about investigating the recovery of state assets lost or is it interested in political witch-hunting.”
