Those who are guilty will hate the SARA legislation

Mar 06, 2017 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Before I discuss the subject of SARA, let us examine a few trends and observations that should help in rearranging the ignorance of some minds. I, like many others who silently speculate, have strong suspicions that there is a composition of individuals and dominant forces steadfastly united in their efforts at keeping certain types of crime alive and operable in Guyana. Hence, resistance toward the establishment of a SARA here is inevitable.
Some of those individuals, I believe are well established; establishments that were made possible as a result of activities that a SARA now seeks to discourage and completely end. Those individuals are not jokers, or masqueraders, they are not bothered about Mashramani; they don’t even support that!
If one is to carefully observe trends, some of the most organized and unified groups are those with dishonest intent, whether it is students who cheat for better grades, narcotic traffickers with their synergetic networks or clandestine persons of prominence who launder money like water flowing from a rapid.
While thousands of acres of land were being leased away for alleged cutbacks, logs and gold smuggled, and cocaine allowed to transit almost unhindered through our ports, a certain political elements in our country sought to promote the impression that overt criminal activity such as armed robbers and simple larcenies were our only nuances. They even attributed it to a particular race.
This, I believe, was one of the many guises to detract attention from those massive covert crimes that were being committed by many who now have deep aversions towards a SARA. Their crimes weren’t snatching bags; they were conscientiously and systematically robbing the state.
Crime has no ethnic origin. There are revelations of criminal activity, particularly related to various types of fraud and narcotics trafficking, which implicated multi-ethnic players. What we see in news reports from multiple media sources and outlets so far suggest that no one is being singled out or prosecuted solely based on ethnic or political linkages.
The same could be said from an observation of matters brought before the Courts so far by the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) relating to other white collar criminal investigations. The State Assets Recovery Unit (SARU) is gearing up to pursue similar ligations, via civil proceedings, once that Agency’s Bill is assented to in our Parliament.
The latter has been creating grave concern, particularly among some persons closely linked or part of the former administration, as well as their surrogates in the private sector.
I made the illustration regarding multi-ethnic collaboration within criminal networks because some individuals are again seeking to use racial innuendoes as distractions and accusatory assertions against those specialized anti-crime units such as SOCU and SARU.
It is fair to say, that some sections of the private sector remain clearly partisan and detest the Coalition Government along with its policies against corruption, tax-evasion, money laundering, narco-trafficking and trafficking of persons; just to name a few of the diabolic criminal activities that placed this country under various international watch-lists and impending sanctions.
Some of those individuals seem to have concerted priorities, which are to extract, pillage and siphon as much as they can from this country. For them, Guyana is their cash cow. Some of those individuals are prime suspects of unchecked capital flight. They cheat Guyana and rob consumers while living extravagant and affluent lifestyles. I have no qualms or issues with affluence, providing it is achieved honestly.
Those individuals hate the coalition and SARU. They believe that one must ‘get rich quickly or die trying’. Anything they do legally is often a front. They have contaminated our socio-cultural sphere, and many young minds whom they influence or brainwash into believing that conning the system makes one successful or a champion. Ironically, some who subscribe to that mindset often find themselves being subjects of those very wheelers and are merely utilized conveniently for errands of their predators.
Astonishingly, some of those individuals are now making their voices heard. They are beginning to smell the SARU coffee and belly-ache daily over State Asset Recovery Agency (SARA) legislation.
To them corruption and abuse of state assets are such integral and acceptable elements of their successes that any accountable system must be challenged as undemocratic or an intrusion to their rights; their rights to continue perpetrating, collaborating, abetting and condoning the depletion of our State’s Assets.
What persisted in the past supported a questionable parallel economy. It placed Guyana in a real bubble. Now that the bubble has burst, the coalition Government finds itself in a precarious position; a position that may require austerity measures to prevent our country from slipping into recession. I will have more to say later
Orette Cutting

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