Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee has come to the defence of the head of the Strategic Management Department (SMD) of the Guyana Police Force, Patrick Mentore, in response to recent demands for him to be relieved of his position in light of his links to the Thomas Carroll visa racket.

Clement Rohee

Speaking at the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s security seminar which took place at the Pegasus Hotel yesterday, the minister said that the administration has expressed its confidence in all the members of the SMD, which is overseeing the implementation of the much talked about police reforms. Mentore, a former police officer and also a former employee of the United States Embassy in Georgetown, was recently named in a book as one of the main players in the Thomas Carroll visa racket of the early 2000s which netted the perpetrators millions of dollars from the sale of US immigrant and non-immigrant visas. The book, ‘The Thomas Carroll Affair’, attempted to chronicle the events surrounding the racket, for which Carroll himself received a significant jail sentence. Since the release of the book, there have been repeated calls from sections of the local society for Mentore to relinquish his position as head of the Strategic Management Department. Mentore himself had declined to address the recent claims in any significant way, emphasizing that the matter was fully ventilated several years ago. “A man published a book the other day and tried to discredit him (Mentore) to say that he ought not to be part of the Strategic Management Department … because of his association with some episode that took place in this country some time ago. But we (are) not accepting that,” Minister Rohee told the seminar yesterday. The Home Affairs Minister explained that Mentore and all the other civilians on the SMD were duly appointed following intense scrutiny by an esteemed panel of interviewers.

Patrick Mentore

“They interviewed these people, grilled them, asked them some very searching questions, and at the end of it they made their recommendations. Home Affairs had nothing to do with it!” Rohee declared, adding that all the Ministry did was to accept the recommendations of the panel.