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Khurshid Sattaur is asking me to pay taxes on money I do not work for

Aug 09, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One day after I wrote my Sunday column on Khurshid Sattaur’s pursuit of Nigel Hughes on Mr. Hughes’s taxes, Mr Sattaur wrote to me accusing me of tax evasion and demanding that I pay taxes on a $250,000 monthly salary that Mr. Sattaur says I work for at the Kaieteur News. I urge readers to note that his demand came one day after my article was written.
Commonsense dictates that Mr. Sattaur will have to take me to court, because I do not receive and never earned that monthly sum from the Kaieteur News. Mr. Sattaur obviously will have to produce his evidence in court. He cannot get such proof from this newspaper because I have never earned that amount. I will leave it to the judge to decide the case based on what Mr. Sattaur produces in court.
Khurshid Sattaur should know that I am not easily intimidated. I have been a political activist since I was sixteen and I am sixty and have not allowed myself to be frightened or bullied by people who are on the wrong side of justice and history. This writer can come up with names of billionaires who are barefaced evaders of income tax, but Mr. Sattaur chooses to come after a virtual working class earner like me. I am no longer employed at UG and I have no other full-time job. So why me?
My history can hardly miss Mr. Sattaur. I was an activist against the PNC Government since the days of Mr. Burnham and since then I have survived. And I have survived the tentacles of people like Mr. Sattaur because I have history on my side. No one in my long years as a human rights activist can accuse me of any form of dishonesty.
I worked for 26 years at UG in which I taught over ten thousand students, and there was never ever a single complaint against me by a student for any type of violation. I worked at UG through the twelve years of Mr. Jagdeo’s presidency, and I am sure there was the meticulous check on me during my years of strident criticism of Mr. Jagdeo and his Government. But the Jagdeo regime could not find even an infinitesimal speck of evidence that I did something wrong in my teaching career.
All they could invent against me at UG was that I hardly did research. Of course my research was beyond their comprehension. What they couldn’t understand, they denied its existence. My research at UG was greater than any effort of all their supporters on the academic staff. And it is my latest research effort on the ethnic base of the exercise of power under Mr. Jagdeo that will provide the basis for my argument when the Jagdeo libel case against me resumes on the morning of September 7. My research will be presented in court and it will prove my statement of ethnic discrimination.
I have survived as a human rights activist for over forty years because I am not and have never been a moral offender.  No one in this entire country can point an accusing finger at me for any type of moral wrongdoing. Most of all I would like the world to know that I have never been accused of beating my wife. I know of those who do not like me, try to victimize me, yet these people are barefaced wife-beaters and continue to do so, and the Guyanese society does not know about it. They have never been exposed. The national organizations that these people are in, and the international organizations that they members of, would be shocked to know about this depravity. I wonder why I have never exposed these people’s appalling behaviour.
So in the final analysis, I have survived all kinds of oppression, because history is on my side. I suspect from the time I wrote in my column that Mr. Sattaur should have informed the public why Roger Khan’s lawyer, Mr. Simels came to Guyana and met with him and what the discussion was all about, Mr. Sattaur has taken on the role of a politician.
I honestly don’t know why Mr. Sattaur feels that I will not have my day in court. I will reserve my right in any case in this country that I feel is politically motivated, to go straight to the Caribbean Court of Justice. I end with a repetition of a statement made to me by Khurshid Sattaur outside Survival Supermarket on Sheriff Street when my car broke down. He yelled, “Freddie yuh gat to buy a new car.” If I was a big earner as he thinks I am, I would have done so a long time ago.

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