HIDING BEHIND THE VEIL OF PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY

Mar 10, 2017 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The Special Organised Crimes Unit (SOCU) has launched an investigation into allegations of corruption/fraud by members of the former PPP/C government in the development of the prime waterfront property at Sparendaam, East Coast Demerara, popularly known as Pradoville 2; and the sale of house lots at this location, fully equipped with infrastructure, to former government officials, including former president Jagdeo, well below market value for the said lots.
You would recall that the Coalition Government, when it assumed office, paid lots of your tax dollars to conduct widespread audits of government ministries. The government represented that the audits disclosed massive acts of corruption and misuse of your money by the former administration. The Pradoville project is deemed to be one such misuse of public funds by high ranking former government officials.
In brief, the audit of the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL) spent quite a large sum of your money to develop the area and then sold the house lots to high ranking former government officials and their allies for far less money than you and I pay for house lots in Guyana. NICIL is a really big entity and it is involved in considerably more areas of Guyana’s economic life than we may ordinarily be aware of. But this talk is not really about NICIL.
What you should, however, know about NICIL is that it was set-up as a company in 1990 to manage the assets of the state; as a result it has the power to sell state assets as it did with Pradoville 2. One of the chief concerns is that there was no transparency with the sale of the Pradoville 2 house lots. It is alleged that there was no advertising of the lots for sale, or no indication of how those who acquired the lots were selected for same.
There is also the concern that if this were an ordinary allocation process then it should have been similar to that which obtains at Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) whereby one who already owns a house lot would be barred from acquiring another. And there is the suggestion that among those who acquired lots at Pradoville 2 there were persons who already owned house lots through prior allocation. Former president Jagdeo is deemed to be one such person relative to his supposed allocation of a lot at Pradoville 1 upon which he built the infamous mansion which was in turn sold at a pregnant price. Most of the persons who acquired lots at Pradoville 2 are high ranking officials and allies of the former government. It is also reported that the average price per house lot was about $1.5 million. Now this is a far cry from what some folks paid at Diamond, East Bank Demerara for house lots not remotely as exquisite. This should concern all of us.
SOCU invited (or arrested) former president Jagdeo, former head of the presidential secretariat Luncheon, former natural resources minister Persaud, among others to visit its office for inquiries. Several of those invited did the honourable thing and attended; while others resisted the invitation. What concerns me more than anything else at this stage of SOCU’s progress is former president Jagdeo’s declaration that he declined to answer certain questions as a consequence of presidential immunity. Perhaps an insight into the nature and scope of presidential immunity will make clearer the cause of my concern.
Presidential immunity is most common in countries with a democratic system of government and a president as the head of government. It is really a reflection of the immunity enjoyed by the monarch in societies ruled by monarchs, and especially the UK. One may argue that the territories which were colonised by the British, including the self-styled world’s leading democracy, the US, retained for their presidents the equivalent of the immunity enjoyed by the monarch.
It wasn’t until 1973 that the US, in the case of the United States –v- Nixon that presidential immunity was formally recognised. What presidential immunity seeks to do is to safeguard the president from being distracted from his or her busy schedule in managing the affairs of the country by having to take time off to defend him/herself in civil litigation or criminal prosecution. Generally, and in the more civilised democracies, presidents are protected from civil litigation for things done in their official capacity as president; not for their private actions. As a matter of fact, in Clinton –v- Jones (19970, president Clinton as he then was, was sued by Ms. Jones for making sexual advances at her.
The court rejected the arguments of broad immunity by his attorneys and stated firmly that no president enjoys immunity for private conduct giving rise to civil litigation. The court suggested that as a matter of convenience the court can be flexible enough to accommodate the president at his or her convenience to give evidence once required, and that this could be done remotely by some technological means.
And mind you, this is in reference to a sitting president. President Nixon was compelled to surrender tapes recordings of conversations which he claimed enjoyed immunity privilege in the conduct of a criminal investigation. In other parts of the world, like the Philippines for instance, presidential immunity is deemed to be so elemental to the democratic process that it is recognised as a primary enjoyment of any president whether or not guaranteed by the constitution or any other legislation
Ronald J. Daniels

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