The “lease of Red House” does not exist; it never did

Jan 06, 2017 Letters

Dear Editor,
I point to Anil Nandlall’s insistence that the government as landlord to a faulty lease could not use its own failures of due diligence in securing that lease to invalidate it, merely because of a change of political administration.
However, Red House the monument – which could no longer be considered mere ‘immovable property’ as would a regular building – had already been vested in the Trust and cannot be leased without the Trust as lessor, and without the permission of the Minister. One might as well claim ownership of the 1763 Monument by obtaining the transport for the Square of the Revolution from Lands and Surveys. Unless, CJRC Inc constructed a new structure for its supposed educational purposes, as per the terms of the lease, no structure on the three lots can be said to be in its ownership.
Of course, that simply deals with the legal issue. The ethics still remain. By gazetting Red House as a national monument in 2000, the PPP ensured that the state remained obligated, ironically under the National Trust Act, to upkeep the operations of the monument, including maintenance, staffing and utilities. They then authorized the CJRC as a not-for-profit – made up of PPP people including at some point Dr. James Rose, then Executive Chairman of the Trust – to run the facility as it saw fit and to earn revenue from both fundraising activities and the rental of the facilities, including to state agencies. What the PPP had in essence created was a thinly disguised cash cow, without any independent scrutiny, all the overheads of which – and a considerable part of client revenue – was paid for by the state. And of course, the lawns of Red House were a regular venue for Freedom House soirees.
Further, in March of 2012, the $12,000-a-year ‘lease of Red House lands’, as it should properly be called, represented a maelstrom of interrelated conflicts of interest, with one person at its epicentre. Dr. James Rose was at the time simultaneously Chairman of the National Trust, Director of Culture under Minister Dr. Frank Anthony, and a principal of Cheddi Jagan Research Centre Inc. As Chair of the National Trust, he was colleague of Mr. Doorga Persaud, Commissioner of Lands and Surveys and signatory to the ‘lease’ ostensibly on behalf of the Commission; as principal of CJRC Inc, he was colleague of Mr. Ralph Ramkarran, signatory to the ‘lease’ on behalf of CJRC Inc. And, as Director of Culture, he had overall policy and operational oversight for cultural heritage preservation and protection, including from illicit appropriation.
Yet at no point did the Trust, the membership of which consisted of both Rose and Persaud, object to the ‘lease’ of a gazetted national monument which was its property, a transaction in which it played no part as prescribed by law. And if there were an omission to execute the Order of transferal, it should have been flagged and corrected by both, Persaud in particular, before the ‘lease’ was executed. It is unfortunate that the current NTA protects individual members of the Trust from suit because, in my humble opinion, there is a prima facie case here for gross and deliberate dereliction of duty by both Rose and Persaud.
In closing, the “lease of Red House”, the gazetted national monument, is not merely invalid or a nullity in law – it simply does not exist and never did. If anything, what the Honourable Chief Justice’ task it is to decide is whether the ‘lease’ of Lots 65, 66 & 67 is valid considering the lands’ strange ownership by the Lands and Surveys Commission in 2012, when they should have properly been vested in the National Trust since 2000 under Section 15 (2) of the National Trust Act. I suspect it is an oversight she will be compelled by the spirit – if not letter – of the law, to correct. To quote one of Mr. Nandlall’s favourite aphorisms, ‘The Law is not an ass”, no matter how the self-perceived ‘best and brightest’ among us may wish to make it so.
Ruel Johnson
Cultural Policy Advisor
Government of Guyana

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