I know why the Government did away with prescriptive rights

Mar 16, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There is no doubt, not even a thread of it, in my mind that there is money in Switzerland. If the PPP loses the election, as sure as night follows day, there will be a probe of corruption and the new government will ask for outside help to track down the stolen money. A portion of it will not be easy to locate.
I was reading in the online Guardian (of London) how impossible (yes, impossible), it is to source some of the loot stolen by people like Mubarak and Gaddafi. The writer argues that the money can be locked away in a labyrinthine scheme that an investigator will not be able to find.
He mentioned off-shore banking. How do you peep inside the account of Roger Smith for money stolen by a former Minister named Saleem Khan? There is no connection. Smith is not the father or brother or cousin of Khan. Smith is an unknown confidante of a businessman who has hidden the money for Khan. Not even the CIA can be so effective.
This is what has happened in Guyana. Corruption cash belonging to former power-holders will not be easy to trace because some of it is in the hands of legitimate business people.
More loot is coming to these people way before the election date is announced. One is the new road from the Timehri Police Station to the airport. If anything is bad-planning, useless and is plain nonsense, it is this project.
I will return to that topic at a future date. But let us look at this thief in the night that suddenly appeared – the abolition of prescriptive rights of state land that Parliament passed last week.
If people from Lethem come to Georgetown, they won’t have to ask where Frederick Kissoon lives. By now that is well known, compliments of Messrs. Jagdeo, Robeson Benn and others who probably ordered workers not to clean the weeds outside my home during a clean-up campaign to spruce up the environment for the UNASAR conference. I am literally yards away from the Caricom Secretariat going east. Opposite from where I live is prime real estate, very expensive land (according to market value) owned by the State.
There are about twelve squatters, some of whom have been settled there for over twenty-five years
One day as I was driving home, I saw the land where these squatters live being surveyed. I stopped and enquired and was told that it was a job undertaken by Lands and Surveys. The operation lasted for three days. I suspect that there was a move to sell this area off to a friend of Mr. Bennettitaceous. Then a strange thing happened.
Days later, GPL came and took away the connections for all those houses. More days later, another strange thing happened. GWI disconnected the water supply. The die was cast. The land was to be sold. And last week the picture became clear.
Parliament has now passed a Bill that does away with prescriptive rights litigation against state lands.
Watch carefully as the weeks unfold, the real estate opposite my home will go to Mr. Benetttitaceous’s friends. We saw it happen last year. Just up the road going east from where I live, a humongous plot was sold at the rate of $3M for an acre. This was sad, very sad indeed. I ran an article on this travesty. I showed using a simple calculator that if the Government had allocated that space to house lots along the lines of the traditional house lot programmes, the State would have netted a few billion dollars more. I was slightly assaulted by the recipient of this fantastic generosity of Mr. Bennettitcaeous, inside a store last year no doubt because I wrote about it.
On this matter, I am yet to hear from the police.
What is going on with the present regime is the rape of this country. It has no parallel even in colonial times. Priceless lands that the lower and middle income workers deserve are being sold for a song to the friends of Mr. Bennettitaceous. It is horrible and immoral. It must be stopped. Even the leaders of the PPP should speak out against this sickness. When the present regime leaves power, there will be no state lands, no state properties left. Arif Bulkan pointed out that our esteemed economist, Clive Thomas, referred to the ruling cabal as a state for itself. Indeed it is. Will they sell the zoo, National Park and the seawall before the national elections?

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I know why the Government did away with prescriptive rights

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