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The Kissoons, the speed of justice and the cry for justice

Aug 27, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The nature of this country is so, so sad. We opened our newspapers and read that the Kissoon Group of Companies got a court order against CLICO. A week before, the centre page of the Stabroek News (Aug 9) carried a heart-breaking story about the very Kissoons. Now I am not saying that the Kissoons did a wrong; I am just describing what I read.
The title is; “Father at odds with Kissoon Group over compensation for son’s death.” The father claimed that the Kissoons are refusing “to pay any sort of compensation to his family although his son who was an employee died while on duty.” The paper quotes the father as saying that he had to cover all expenses for the funeral.
The article goes on to quote some very serious accusations the dead man’s family made against the Kissoons but that would take up too much space to reproduce. I ask readers to Google that story and see how sad it is. The paper did seek a comment from the Kissoons but the Human Resource Officer said the company was still investigating. The victim worked for eight years with the Kissoons. Thank God for a free press!
It needs to be said on how in some circumstances justice takes wings and flies very fast and in some episodes, justice has no limbs and cannot move. This columnist has been involved in investigation of police inaction that is too numerous to mention. Rape victims had to wait a considerable time before police statements were taken.
In many cases, police inactivity caused victims to just abandon the pursuit of justice. I know a situation in which a man and his wife (jewelry store owners) drew up to their gate in their car, as the wife came out, she was shot and robbed. She died. The police took a statement from the husband one month after. Try getting the police to come to take fingerprints if a small store owner or market vendor is robbed.
In the case of big businesses, the police vehicles become aircraft. I wrote about this supersonic speed of the police in the case of two robberies against Toolsie Persaud Ltd. Within a week, the police had their accused. In the case of the marshals going to CLICO on Camp Street to seize items for the Kissoon Group of Companies, there is no question in my mind that the Kissoon Group or their lawyers provided the transportation.
When the PPP took over in 1992, President Desmond Hoyte had already had the economy jump-started. But many holes were still to be filled. One of these was transportation for the Marshals’ Office below the High Court. Do you know from the eighties until now, that office has no vehicles of its own to carry out the decisions of the courts? When an injunction or a nisi order or similar decisions are given by a judge, the plaintiff has to provide transport for the marshal. Yet this Government refuses to accept that Guyana has not reached the level of a failed state.
There can be no democracy if the courts do not function and there isn’t an infrastructural machinery for the decisions of the courts to be carried out. This writer understands that a number of former Customs Officers who took the Government to court are still to receive monies from the State that the High Court ordered to be paid to them. Yet these little dictators in government can tell this nation that they have brought democracy to Guyana after 1992.
My interpretation of the decision by the Attorney-General to return the seized vehicles to the CLICO compound is that the Kissoon Group won a court order against a company that no longer exists. CLICO as it had existed when the Kissoon-owned Park Hotel was burnt down in 2001 had been declared bankrupt. Its assets have been taken over by the State. The State now owns CLICO. Previous transactions by that company no longer can be validated, the best example of which is that hundreds of policy-holders lost hundreds of millions. Why then should the Kissoon Group stand to gain from a defunct company when many pensioners are still owed by the old CLICO?
Those vehicles should never have been granted to the Kissoon Group by the present administrators of CLICO. Incidentally while researching this essay, I found that the Kissoon Group has endured more fires than any other company in the history of this country. That is a fact the media should research on. A senior media functionary told me he has strange facts on these fires.

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