September 29,2017
If the charges of corruption weren’t so deadly you could actually laugh at Donald Ramotar’s reaction to police investigation of a certain Finance Ministry official. Ramotar said he knows the gentleman very well, he is honest and he is the victim of a witch-hunt. But Ramotar is now facing serious embarrassment.When the channel 65, MTV was started, one of the trustees was Donald Ramotar. The board of trustees is like guarantors; these guarantors are not the owners but they have legal standing in the company or entity. I don’t know if Ramotar is still one of the trustees of MTV but many of the owners when it started up were his friends, including the businessman who has a store not far from Freedom House.
His own friends at MTV have filed a lawsuit against the wife of former PPP prince, Robert Persaud. Kamini Persaud was the general manager of MTV soon after it started until last year.The claim is shocking. The company wants Mrs. Persaud to pay back $41 million. In the social sciences there is a methodology called logical deduction. In law, there is the approach called circumstantial evidence. Actually, circumstantial evidence is the name jurists have given to the term, logical deduction. They mean the same.
We will come to the application of logical deduction to determine if the Jagdeo regime and the Ramotar surrogacy were characterized by downright theft of public money.The writ against Kamini Persaud claims that she spent millions of dollars on her personal self (not on the company) without authorization. This is euphemism. It means the accused used money for personal reasons not backed by legal documentation.
Now let us go slowly so readers could understand the morbid nonsense in the head of Jagdeo, Ramotar and those PPP leaders that governed Guyana for twenty-three years and are now claiming witch-hunting by the government against PPP mandarins that stole from the Treasury.If you read the writ against Kamini Persaud, the language and accusations are identical in the forensic audits. But Ramotar has not come to the rescue of Kamini. He has not accused his friends of harassing Kamini. But he has written letters upon letters crying witch-hunting by SOCU against former PPP Ministers.
Let us look at logical deduction now. If PPP businessmen ( MTV was funded by a group of local and Indian businessmen very close to the PPP) can claim that Kamini ripped them off, why can’t the APNU+AFC government make the same accusations against the friends of Kamini (niece of Bharrat Jagdeo) who were in power?
Surely, one has to be stupid to accept that MTV owners have a genuine case (MTV called in auditors to do a forensic analysis of MTV books) but the government hasn’t got even one genuine case against the PPP leaders who stole while they were in power.
Before we leave the MTV saga we need to ask Ramotar if he believes the writ against Kamini is malicious and vindictive. We are not going to get that answer because De Donald is in a scary maze from which exit is not easy. The people who want the S41 million back from Kamini are friends of the PPP and De Donald himself.
I could go on to describe what one of these owners, a New York businessman, did for De Donald when he was General-Secretary of the PPP during the Jagdeo presidency. I am too old, like De Donald, to walk the court steps to defend a libel writ. But I could still write it and risk a libel from De Donald because by the time that comes to trial, De Donald and I would be far away from Planet Earth.
I am not going to comment on the writ against Kamini because it is now before the courts but there are lessons to be learnt. If MTV could make these claims against a minister’s wife, why is one not to assume that personal aggrandizement occurred on a prodigious scale in the twenty- three years the PPP held power? I am saying that every Guyanese must assume that because the evidence against these PPP leaders is graphic.
Extensive financial skullduggery went on under Jagdeo and Ramotar. Hundreds of billions of dollars were siphoned off and the time has come to prosecute these people. These criminal minds have done the unthinkable – instead of staying silent, they have gone on the offensive. They have stolen incredible amounts and have the immoral repugnancy to claim that they are being victimized by the new government. These are monies that belong to the people of Guyana. The people of Guyana want justice.
